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The Rise of Open Models in the Enterprise — Amir Haghighat, Baseten
Takeaway
Enterprise AI's next phase is open-weights models running on customer infra, mirroring the 2010s shift from buying Salesforce to building on Snowflake.
Summary
- Baseten's CTO, after talking to 100+ Fortune-50 enterprises, says they all start on OpenAI/Anthropic via dedicated Azure/AWS deployments for security and privacy.
- Cracks appearing in the closed-model assumption — enterprises increasingly want to build with AI themselves, not just buy vertical SaaS (Sierra, Clay, etc.).
- Argues the real value unlock — and the next Snowflake/Databricks/Datadog of AI — only happens once enterprises build horizontally with open models, not just buy vertical agents.
- Tracks the 2023→now shift from 'is open source good enough?' to enterprises seriously evaluating open-weights models in production.
open-modelsenterprisebaseten
Original description
This year kicked off with the DeepSeek-R1 news cycle breaking out of our AI Engineering bubble into the mainstream tech and business world. Leaders at the highest levels of the largest enterprises started asking how open source models could enhance and accelerate their AI strategy. Open source models promise increased ownership of AI systems: control over performance and price, improved uptime and reliability, better compliance, and flexible hosting options. How are these promises playing out after months of implementation? In this talk, I’ll draw on hundreds of conversations with AI leaders at enterprise companies to discuss what has — and hasn’t — changed about enterprise AI strategy in a world where open-source models compete on the frontier of intelligence. ---related links--- http://twitter.com/amiruci https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirhaghighat/ https://www.baseten.co/blog/ https://www.baseten.co/