{"text":[[{"start":6.24,"text":"The writer is an open-internet activist and president of the Mozilla Foundation"}],[{"start":11.18,"text":"We cannot go a day without people asking: when will the artificial intelligence bubble pop and what will be the cause? I increasingly think that open-source AI models may be the pin that pops the bubble. "}],[{"start":25.91,"text":"Current AI valuations assume massive, durable moats. Investors have priced in the assumption that only a few companies can build frontier AI models, allowing them to extract monopoly rents. "}],[{"start":40.75,"text":"But if open-source models can match the performance of closed models at a fraction of the cost, that assumption collapses. Think about the billions of dollars in venture investment in OpenAI and Anthropic — as well as internal investment at Google. If the market realises that closed models may be good for cutting-edge research but unnecessary for most AI applications, valuations plummet."}],[{"start":71.18,"text":"A recent study by MIT economist Frank Nagle shows exactly how good open AI models have become. They are on average six times cheaper to use than equivalent closed models. And they are narrowing the performance gap within a few months of each new closed-model release. The speed of this catch-up cycle is accelerating."}],[{"start":95.26,"text":"If users were to choose the best observable AI model based on both price and performance they could save $20bn-$48bn a year. "}],[{"start":106.26,"text":"Of course, both OpenAI and Google also developed open models — free to use and somewhat flexible. But these often feel like side projects. They are unlikely to win market share unless the companies put more work into them."}],[{"start":122.30000000000001,"text":"The companies that are leading in open-source AI are Chinese. Models by DeepSeek and Alibaba regularly excel in widely used AI benchmarks. A recent study by MIT and developer platform Hugging Face showed a steep decline in the market share of open models from Google, Meta and OpenAI, and a sharp increase in the use of models like DeepSeek and Qwen."}],[{"start":150.25,"text":"Western companies and research labs are hot on their heels. French start-up Mistral has released all of its new models as open source. Mistral Large 3 debuted at number two among open-source non-reasoning models on the LMArena leaderboard, within striking distance of its Chinese competitors. And Seattle-based lab Ai2 released a new set of its Olmo models as truly open — meaning every step of the development pipeline was exposed, from the underlying training data to the parameters that define the model’s output. The extra flexibility and utility this creates are very useful for developers building apps and services on top of AI models."}],[{"start":193.8,"text":"What’s interesting — and worrisome — is that governments are moving to invest huge amounts in closed-model AI. European countries — and those like Canada, where I come from — talk a great deal about tech sovereignty and using AI to drive economic growth. Yet they seem to be ignoring the fact that leaning into open source could get them to these goals faster and cheaper than backing large tech companies."}],[{"start":220.55,"text":"More consequentially, whether governments integrate open-source AI models into their plans could be a major driver in whether they are winners or losers in the AI race over the long run. "}],[{"start":234.13000000000002,"text":"The tipping point could come soon. When a major enterprise announces that it’s switching from a closed model to an open alternative — or when a breakout consumer app is built on a truly open model — investors will realise that the game has changed. "}],[{"start":250.72000000000003,"text":"The next question is: who will be the winners when the bubble pops? If the dotcom crash is anything to go by it could be the open-source AI model creators. The free, open-source operating system Linux — on which 90 per cent of the public cloud runs today — proved resilient in the aftermath of that crash. The same pattern could be repeated today. The companies with lower valuations now could have significant upside tomorrow."}],[{"start":288.88,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1766445521_9780.mp3"}