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Start free trial →Prof G Media · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Pushed on the point that open models are supposed to be free, Misha explains that a model's license can be free while the compute, serving software and workflows around it still cost money. It's where the business in open AI models actually sits.
…source, in AI, we really think about it, we think about it as open models. The model, you're either renting it from someone or you can put it, I can give it to you on a flash drive. You can own it and you can run it on your own infrastructure and your computers. That is the fundamental difference.
…open models is that they're free. It's, I mean, when you buy a home and you own a home, you've got to pay money to buy the home. But with open source models, my understanding is anyone can use it, anyone can build on it, customize it. And that is a sort of a crucial element. Do I have that wrong?
No, I think you're right. But it's kind of like what would be the analogy here? The model may be free, even though some models choose to license. So you can have an open model that someone can own that has a license attached to it, right? And that's, you know, Meta's latest model, Muse, has a license attached to it, a commercial license if you're a distributor. Kimi K3 has a license attached to it if you're a distributor. So you can have open where there's a license attached to it that can be monetized. And by the way, even Linux, it has a license attached to it where if you make certain modifications to it, those have to be open as well. So it's not like there's a whole ecosystem of licenses around open source software and open models. And so it doesn't necessarily mean that open means free. Now, most licenses on open models today are free. And even our model, Beam that we released, it's an Apache 2 license, meaning that it is free. But just because the model is free doesn't mean that everything around it is free. If you are a customer or an enterprise and you want to run open models, well, you need to get the compute from somewhere. So you need to pay for the compute. You need to get…