2023, year of open LLMs

the hype around open LLMs is exhausting, but it's undeniable. 2023 was the year the open-source community finally broke through the proprietary gatekeepers. we're no longer stuck waiting for closed APIs; we can actually inspect, modify, and deploy models. this shift immediately lowers the barrier to entry, which is good for small agencies, but it also means the noise level is insane.

the real impact isn't just the models themselves; it's the tooling and the sheer volume of community-driven fine-tuning. the quality is uneven, sure, but the pace of iteration has exploded. it's less about a single 'best' model and more about the ecosystem growing exponentially.