With the weights file (Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen and company), you can run the model on your own hardware, fine-tune it, quantize it, and ship it without a per-token bill or a provider's terms deciding what you may build. Data never leaves your infrastructure — decisive for regulated industries.

"Open weights" is deliberately not "open source": the training data and code usually stay private, and licenses carry restrictions. The strategic drama the index tracks: open-weight models trail the frontier by months, not years, and the gap keeps narrowing.