SITUATION EXPLAINED: Why does every serious company need open weights now? We asked @DanielleFong, founder of LightCell Energy: "I was working with Fable on a giant live real-time radiative sim. Fable was helping with this quite a lot and then was not available right at the point where we had really settled the physics. I had to spend $5,000 worth of API spend in order to make the talk happen." "If I have a capability that these models have developed to harness and then the model goes away, if I don't have any fallback, I can't even do it." "Silent degradation, if you were detected to be working on frontier model stuff. It was in the system card for Fable that it would do this. No one liked this at all. And there are lots of times when I'm wondering, am I being silently degraded, and it's just making stuff up." "The thing about open weights in addition to being able to serve it is you're able to do modifications, understand what's happening, figure out where the model has its greatest tensions and is getting confused."