BeginnerLesson 4 of 57 min read
Open or closed: what it means for you
A course from the Academy: They are not all the same.
Go to the quiz ↓The debate is very much in the news. For a user, it boils down to two or three practical consequences.
Closed
The model runs at the provider's end, and you access it through their service. You can neither install it nor inspect it. In return: nothing to manage, always up to date, and generally the best available at the time of writing.
Open
The files are published. You can download it, install it on your own machine or your company's, and adapt it to your needs.
Watch the vocabulary: we usually talk about open weights, not open source code in the usual sense. The model files are public; the data used to train it, almost never.
The consequence that matters to you
An open model installed on your premises, nothing leaves your machine. For a medical practice, a law firm, a company handling sensitive data, it is sometimes the only acceptable option. The price to pay: hardware, installation, and quality that is generally a notch below the best closed model of the moment.
The third case, which settles many situations
An open model hosted in Europe by a provider. Neither your machine nor a consumer service: a contract, identified hosting, and no training on your data.
For you, today
If you are just starting out, a closed consumer service is the right choice. The open question arises when confidentiality becomes a constraint.
Key concepts
Complete the lesson
A 4-question quiz: 3 correct answers are enough, plus an exercise to practise. It opens in the Academy, on this same lesson.
Take the quiz and complete the lesson Free. With an account, your progress is saved and leads to the course certificate.The course: They are not all the same.
- Quick or considered: two families8 min
- Multimodal: when it sees and hears7 min
- The context window: its working memory7 min
- Open or closed: what it means for you7 min
- Choosing in practice, in three questions6 min