Tim O’Reilly argues that major AI laboratories are prioritising ever-larger, tightly controlled models over the flexible systems ordinary users need. He believes AI should be developed as an open creative medium, with people able to customise and understand the full technology stack rather than being locked into corporate platforms that can track them.

O’Reilly distinguishes true open-source AI from merely releasing model weights, calling instead for openness across models, software harnesses and applications. He says frontier models are increasingly better only at selected tasks, while lower-level models could spread innovation more widely; he also argues that cybersecurity and biosecurity concerns may be stronger reasons to slow frontier systems than to restrict open-weight models.