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WTF do people use Open Models for??
Takeaway
Open models in production are mostly running creative writing, roleplay, and companionship — and enterprises pin year-old models like Mistral Nemo for stability.
Summary
- Eugene (Featherless AI) shares data on actual open-model usage: 50K+ models uploaded to HuggingFace per month; DeepSeek R1 alone moved 2.74 exabytes via 4M downloads of a 685GB model.
- For individuals (flat-rate $25/mo, no per-token pricing), DeepSeek R1 dominates, then Llama 3, Mistral Nemo, Qwen — choice driven by vibes/fame not MMLU or cost.
- Commercial usage is dominated by Mistral Nemo (Apache 2.0, pre-Llama-license-restriction) — Enterprises pin model versions for years for stability ('don't break it') and Llama Guard 2 stays for safeguard tutorials.
- Top non-coding workloads (30-40% of all traffic): AI roleplay/companionship/therapy/creative writing — 60%+ users are women, mirrors romance-novel market, not the stereotype.
- Use cases beyond coding: comfy UI image gen, agents/work, journaling/therapy — 'no one cares about MMLU, this segment is all about Vibes'.
open-modelshuggingfacecompanionship-ai
Original description
from Eugene Cheah, CEO, Featherless.ai Covering the open weights landscape. What’s being downloaded. What’s being used. The heritage and what’s to come next