Michael O'Donnell Photography

Deciding on AI models is as much of a technical decision and it is a strategic one. But choosing open, closed or hybrid models all have trade-offs.

While speaking at this year’s VB Transform, model architecture experts from General Motors, Zoom and IBM discussed how their companies and customers consider AI model selection.

Barak Turovsky, who in March became GM’s first chief AI officer, said there’s a lot of noise with every new model release and every time the leaderboard changes. Long before leaderboards were a mainstream debate, Turovsky helped launch the first large language model (LLM) and recalled the ways open-sourcing AI model weights and training data led to major breakthroughs.

“That was frankly probably one of the biggest breakthroughs that helped OpenAI and others to start launching,” Turovsky said. “So it’s actually a funny anecdote: Open-source actually helped create something that went closed and now maybe is back to being open.”

Factors for decisions vary and include cost, performance, trust and safety. Turovsky said enterprises sometimes prefer a mixed strategy — using an open model for internal use and a closed model for production and customer facing or vice versa.