Open Source AI Model Adoption During Plateau Periods

In between major AI model breakthroughs, new models still ship, but they’re not fundamentally expanding what you can do with them. Braintrust CEO @ankrgyl says that’s exactly when open source starts to surge: "When new models come out, people forget about open source and forget about economics because it changes fundamentally what you can do." "Programming is a good example. The workflow today is completely different than it was a year ago. If you tried to use models from a year ago today, you wouldn't be able to do crazy stuff like OpenClaw or whatever people are building nowadays." "When models don't change at that speed, people optimize the performance on the use cases that they have." "If you look at usage on our platform, almost half the token usage is coming from open source models from a very small number of companies that have figured out how to optimize use cases really well."