In the 1980’s, there were no freely available C compilers (I guess Borland was inexpensive, but not free). The GNU C Compiler was the first such. The project focused on being bootstrappable, reproducibility from source with a fixed dependency chain.
Corporates took advantage of GCC, and continue to, but have also been happy that LLVM came along with its permissive licensing. LLVM was a free lunch for GPU deployment, letting corporates customize it to compile shaders without having to release the sources.
In the LLM era of mostly closed weights, closed and pirated datasets and inaccessible compute requirements, what would, or does, an open alternative look like? Or should something else be done?
not answering the question:
but i stumbled across this https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-switch-4.1-8b
Granite Switch 4.1 8B is a modular LLM that composes a base model, multiple adapters and an encoder together so that a single hosted endpoint can move between natural-language responses, general and specialized decisions, and speech-to-text.