Episode notes
Enterprises want AI built on their own data, and they don’t want to hand that data to someone else to do it. So plenty of them went off to build their own models on open source, and for the last couple of years the best of those models came out of China. This week the West stepped up. A New York startup called Reflection unveiled Beam, and France’s Mistral followed a day later with a trillion parameter model they’ve nicknamed Le Chonk.
What we land on is that the pitch isn’t “we’re the best”. It’s “we’re good enough, and built in the West”. Sitting a step behind the leading open models is close enough to give Western businesses the confidence and security to own their AI rather than rent it.
That’s the real fight now, open versus closed. The smartest AI stays expensive, the workhorse models do the grunt work, and the closed labs are answering with cheap workhorses of their own.
For small and medium business, though, owning isn’t the play. A top-spec desktop box costs around fifteen grand, runs slowly and serves one person, when the same kind of model is available for cents. Enterprise builds its own. Small business gets the benefit without the build. And for Australia, with no frontier lab of our own, open models are how some of that control comes back onshore. As Reflection’s founder put it, the only way to truly own intelligence is if it’s open.
Jez and Cam on the West’s answer in the open model race, and how small business gets the upside of all this without carrying the cost of owning it.
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Vibe CFO is Australian founded. An AI CFO for small and medium business, out of the box, governed and secure.
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