Definition

An open-weight model can be downloaded and run on a computer of your own. Inputs then need not go to a model provider (An AI provider runs language models and sells access to them, for example OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude) or Google (Gemini).).

What it means for you

Instead of a model in the cloud, an open-weight model can run on your own hardware or on ours.

More terms

  • Language model (AI model, LLM)A language model is the actual AI behind an AI assistant: it has learned from a great deal of text and writes an answer to an input.
  • Local or hybridLocally, the language model runs on your hardware; in a hybrid setup the working files stay local and only the excerpts needed go to a cloud model.
  • CloudThe cloud means computers in a provider’s data centres on which programs run and data is kept, instead of on your own device.

All terms