IBL News | New York
Open-source AI has arrived in corporate America.
Companies like AT&T are increasingly using cheap, freely available open-source AI models instead of expensive, closed models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
They mostly use these models to support customer service, call transcription, and coding, as AI costs are skyrocketing.
By May, open models accounted for 20 percent of AT&T’s AI use, saving up to 80 percent in tokens compared with earlier this year.
Like AT&T, companies such as Airbnb and Deloitte are also turning to open AI models that are easy to customize and cheaper to use.
Last month, open models accounted for 58 percent of AI use, up from 10 percent a year ago, according to U.S. user data from OpenRouter, a platform that lets people choose different models to complete tasks.
Last month, Nvidia announced it was buying Hugging Face, a library of open AI models, for $12.9 billion, another sign of the technology’s importance.
Rather than spending millions in fees to use a closed model, developers can download one of the Chinese systems and build their products on top of it, paying mainly for servers, while OpenAI and Anthropic charge for subscriptions and other fees, depending on the job.
Many of the most popular open AI models are made by Chinese companies like Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and Alibaba. Some of them are now 80 percent to 90 percent as powerful as those from OpenAI and Anthropic, while costing as little as 20 percent of the price.
Meanwhile, Nvidia, Meta, and other U.S. companies are unveiling their own new open AI models. Last month, Meta made its leading AI system an open-weights model and said it would offer the model at a lower cost than other top U.S. models.
Most U.S. companies still use a combination of open and closed models. Closed models remain the best for heavy-duty tasks like coding and image and video generation, while open models often excel at simple, specialized tasks. Some U.S. firms remain reluctant to use Chinese AI models due to concerns about regulation and data privacy.
AT&T is working with popular alternatives from American companies, such as Google’s Gemma AI model and Meta’s Llama AI models.