Today’s best AI models, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, come with conditions: their creators control the terms on which they are accessed to prevent them being used in harmful ways. This is in contrast with ‘open’ models, which can be downloaded, modified, and used by anyone for almost any purpose. A new report by non-profit research organization Epoch AI found that open models available today are about a year behind the top closed models.
“The best open model today is on par with closed models in performance, but with a lag of about one year,” says Ben Cottier, lead researcher on the report.
Meta’s Llama 3.1405B, an open model released in July, took about 16 months to match the capabilities of the first version of GPT-4. If Meta’s next generation AI, Llama 4, is released as an open model, as it is widely expected to be, this gap could shrink …