---
title: "Open models grow up"
date: "2024-04-19"
summary: "Llama 3 ships open weights, and for a builder twice burned by platforms he didn't control, a model you can hold on your own disk changes the calculus"
tags: ["open-weights","llama-3","ownership","ai"]
---

Yesterday Meta dropped Llama 3, and the weights are right there. Not an API key, not a rate limit, not a terms-of-service page that can change while you sleep. The actual model, sitting on a disk you control.

I ran it against the kind of work I'd been sending to the closed labs. It held. Not the very top of the chart yet, but close enough that the gap stopped being the point. The gap is closing fast, and you can feel the direction of it.

I have a specific reason to care about this, and it isn't ideology.

In 2021 I poured a year into a Web3 project and watched it die — not because the idea was wrong, but because the ground it stood on belonged to other people, and that ground turned to noise and scams overnight. Before that, going back further, I shipped a mobile content platform across five countries and lived entirely at the mercy of carrier gatekeepers. You build something real, and one upstream decision you don't control can erase it.

So when I say weights you can hold matter, I mean it the way a man means it after he's been burned. A model on my own machine can't be deprecated out from under me. It can't quietly raise its price or change its rules mid-project. It runs in five years exactly as it runs today.

The closed models are still sharper, and for now I'll keep using them where they win. But something shifted yesterday. The best tools are no longer only the ones you rent.

I want to build on foundations I can put my hand on. For the first time, the foundation is open — and catching up.