That's a fair amount of computational and labor overhead mind you, as you'll need to verify and prune the quality of your mountain of synthetic data, but certainly possible.
Though this assumes the legal system is a rational actor playing by the set of rules it claims to. In fact, I highly suspect you could get very unlucky and get an unfavorable ruling against you, because you stepped on a big pile of money's toes in the process of doing this.
Are LLMs what we need to make all data public domain? This way it could be used for that purpose
Decentralized unstoppable storage, combined with decentralized unstoppable training, sorta like SETI for AI training. The seed of this tech already exists with IPFS and others like it.
We know (some? all?) of the big labs have skirted copyright laws at one point or another. Truly open models would just build on what is publicly available.
The first broadly useful fully open source models will do this.
We already have open data / open code / open weights for some domain-specific cases, such as audio models trained on large open datasets, eg. Tacotron / LJSpeech from waaay back in the day, though that is certainly not SOTA anymore.
Distillation could possibly be considered an early case of this as raw AI outputs are themselves not copyrightable unless humans enrich, filter, or transform them. Granted, that does not handle the cases where the outputs are sufficiently similar to copyrighted original works.
That said, I don't necessarily disagree with you. Talkie[1] presents an interesting case for it being at least possible to do this entirely on public domain material.
But even that used Claude somewhere in the course of its training pipeline (it's listed as a contributor on their GitHub), so again, how granular you want to get with that is still a question.
I personally find the analogy unconvincing, the UX dimension is completely different as I can use the same harness with any model; and the year of the linux desktop is coming soon (tm)
Open models can be used/changed for social manipulation too, by anyone, which scares a bunch of people, as opposed to the dark pattern manipulation from Big Ai/Tech
Sure there are all kinds of problems with that situation. But it still demonstrates that they can be coerced: play nice or don't play at all.
All that said, the headline claims do not match the self-reported performance. For example, the dense 32B model is significantly behind Qwen3.8 27B (chart towards the bottom of https://ifm.ai/blog/k2). Gemma4 31B is not in the comparison set. This is the most important sweet spot for self hosted open-weight models today and real competition here will be very welcome.
The 7B does look very, very good however.
It failed my basic test I like to ask models and generated incorrect code. When prompted about the bug, it preceded to start hallucinating non-existent APIs. After doing that it got caught in a loop trying to desk check the solution that didn't work.
The reason I personally like my question is because it's pretty close to some of the real world work we do. It's mostly mundane and easy to bang out, but really easy for someone to do a n log n solution where an n solution exists.
A good example (but not my question) would be something like
"I have a list of People objects with a `first` and `last` name. Write a function which groups together all the People with the same last name in `your language of choice`"
I wouldn't have dreamed to use this as an agent model.
7B models of the past have been able to pass this question. I've not tested it on a 4B model until now.
Some other open models I'm aware of:
- OLMo
- Apertus
- Soofi
- OpenEuroLLM
- llm-jp
I'm no expert, which is part of why these projects excite me. I'm hoping they can be good projects to learn from as well.
But over time, more and more people got into the chip-making business, and the big players started releasing more and more chips. Now only the die-hard CPU trackers worry about every new CPU and exactly how it's better ... while everyone else just worries about "which CPU will be good enough at this moment".
I think models are on that same arc.
Or who remembers the dancing disease of 1518, were people would stop what they are doing and start randomly doing the same dance. The lords? Out of their minds. The priests? Terrified the devil had taken hold of the flock! I have come to believe that it was probably some tik-tok like hype trend of doing a fortnite dance while waiting in line for bread and communion. And the energy back then, like now, was off the charts.
Hype and memetic trend seeking encoded deep in human psyche.
There is, for example, no Qwen3.8 7B.
It is odd to me, though, that they didn't run the same benchmark suite for the various quants.
edit: Tried signing up and using the internal playground. Holy shit thats fast.
375 A23B, 36 A4B, 32B, 7B, 3.7B, 0.9B variants.
> 32B: Ranking among the top models in its class, 32B is our most powerful dense model, balancing capability, adaptability, and local deployability.
> 7B: The industry’s best-performing model under 10B combines strong software engineering and expert knowledge in a package small enough to run on a phone.
For example, 3.3 Tbyte for code reasoning, 4.5 Tbyte for mathematical reasoning, 8.4 Tbyte of pre-train behaviors, and so on.
I did not compute the sum of the dataset sizes, but it appears to be some tens of Tbyte. Nonetheless, I assume that this amount of training data is more than an order of magnitude less than what OpenAI, Anthropic and the like have used, which must have been at least many hundreds of Tbyte, but more likely several thousands of Tbyte of data.