“Open source” is printed on the download button — what you almost always get is “open weights”. What you may do with it is decided by the licence, and in 2026 that licence reached the mid-sized business: rights lapse above 20 million in revenue, not 700 million users. Some clauses shut EU companies out entirely — and don’t even appear in the licence file.
Read more →“The open models have caught up” is true — and misleading. The best open model trails the world’s best by only 3 points, but it has 2.8 trillion parameters and runs only in the data centre. What fits on your graphics card lags by around 23 points. “Open” is not “local” — and a computed-down model doesn’t hiss, it lies with confidence. Running it costs more than the card.
Read more →“Local AI is cheaper” is the first argument to fall once you do the math. What decides is not the token price but how many tokens a task burns — and what the finished build costs. At realistic office use your own card lands at 27.70 € per million tokens, and even under full load (0.51 €) it stays pricier than a cheap cloud model (0.26 €), at lower quality. Price is no reason to go local.
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