The inevitable need for an open model consortium

The author argues that an industry-wide consortium represents the only sustainable path for frontier open-source models, as individual labs face mounting turnover and R&D costs. Evidence includes Nvidia's Coalition/Nemotron initiative and recent departures at Qwen and AI2, with economic pressures predicted to intensify on Chinese startups like Moonshot AI and MiniMax. The article forecasts companies will release many smaller, fine-tunable models rather than competitive frontier models.