“You open source part of the technology so it becomes widely adopted technology that your company is the expert in, and then you can sell a lot of things around that,” says Mike Linksvayer, VP of developer policy at GitHub — such as bonus features or services. Big tech companies including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google have used open source strategies. 

But generative AI models are different from your typical software product. They’ve been mostly developed in a handful of advanced AI labs by a relatively small number of highly in-demand specialist researchers, and also need large quantities of specialist AI chips (GPUs) to operate at scale.