Raffi Krikorian explains that while consumers flock to ChatGPT and Claude, companies are increasingly turning to open models that they can customize and control.

For decades, Mozilla has been one of the strongest advocates for an open internet. Today, as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly central to how businesses and governments operate, the organization is making a similar case for open AI.

In a report published last month, Mozilla, a free software community and nonprofit project, said the performance gap between top open-source models and proprietary systems like Claude and ChatGPT has narrowed to just 3%. The report highlighted the growing popularity of open models, noting that in February 2026, Alibaba’s open-source model Qwen was downloaded more times than the next eight models combined.

The debate over open AI has gained fresh momentum after Meta released a new open-weight model on August 10, and promised more would come soon.

Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla’s chief technology officer, believes organizations need alternatives to proprietary AI systems to gain greater control over their data and infrastructure.

  • iceberg314@slrpnk.net
    5·
    2 days ago

    Yeah I too am a big supporter. There are already all sorts of open models on Hugging Face. The smaller fined tuned models are often better than the big models at the specific tasks they are trained for.

    There’s just a big learning curve at how to start using the open weight models and LoRAs on Hugging Face for example