Because I can run Qwen 3.6 or DeepSeek V4 until the end of time if I want to? The model is on HuggingFace; anyone can download it. I have Qwen and Gemma on my laptop right now if I want to use them, even if I decide to go be a hermit who never interacts with the outside world again.

I will concede a use case for hermits.

Or travel. Even in the developed world you can be without internet or slow internet. I have Gemma 4 E4B on my phone that can process audio, image, and text if I have need to.

Ok but we're talking about the concern that a provider can 3x or nerf a model. I'm pointing out that open weights providers can do that too, and your only recourse is to run it yourself at way more than 3x the price.

You might not be able to audit the weights, but there are people with the skill set to do it.

If providers decide to jack the price, open weights lets you find a new provider without losing your fine tunes and having to re-do workflows, etc like you would if you switched off a frontier lab model.

you keep the model. it's never deprecated. with closed ai, you are forced into a new more expensive model every few months. if an open model infra provider does that, you simply switch to another one. it's not in their interest to do that.

That's not really true though, providers are deprecating models and I have at least 10 emails to prove it.

Nothing stops you from downloading the model and hosting it on a cloud virtual machine

Common sense does, but other than that I suppose you're right.

A provider deprecating a model doesn't mean the .gguf file disappears from my computer.

When the weights are publically available (and open to use), then there's a free market for hosting that model at least. That's not independence for me, but it's lack of vendor lock-in.

For some of the open models, there's a list of 20-30 providers of the same model on openrouter for example, as an example of the supply.