learned a lot from this conversation with @simon_mo_ and @BornsteinMatt. biggest takeaways for me: -there are a lot of reasons why we should like open-weight models. a lot of these arguments stop at handwavy things like "what if the labs stop releasing frontier models to the public" or "it's lower cost." but simon's position as lead maintainer of @vllm_project and CEO of @inferact give him authority to talk about some of the other, more interesting and concrete reasons to pay attention to open-weight models, namely that they allow end-users to calibrate latency / other performance metrics with way more customizability than what any of the frontier closed-source labs offer (and without the fear that your job might be met with a refusal at some random point where you're deep in a 2 hour job) -re: the above point...for this reason, a lot of US companies (inferact included!) choose to use open-weight models over their closed-source alternatives. this also isn't limited to internal workloads / research - on a recent a16z podcast the team at @DecagonAI spoke about how something like 90% of their customer service ai agents run on open-weight models that they've fine-tuned. -we should really appreciate how many companies/teams came out researchers fascinated by the wave of very small open-weight models that were being distilled from e.g. gpt-3.5 and earlier models in 2022/2023 (prior to the release of chatGPT!). these small models motivated the development of pagedattention, which then led to vlmm/inferact (at other layers of the stack with similar origin stories, you can look at teams like openrouter or ollama). in other words, we have open-weight models to thank for a bunch of the orchestration infra we now rely on. i think yet another, indirect, way we can point to open-source/weight infra pushing the frontier forward. anyway, a lot more in this convo, it was a lot of fun!