Until a few months ago, the gap between API-based and open-source foundation models was significant. Models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude in the language space, DALL-E, and Midjourney in the computer vision space, seemed significantly advanced compared to open-source alternatives. However, a change started to occur late last year with the surprising open-source release of Stable Diffusion, which provided a viable alternative to API-based text-to-image models. Despite this, large language models (LLMs) continued to be the focal point of generative AI, and in that domain, open-source models paled in comparison to API-based alternatives in terms of quality.
