But what about running Deepseek R1 or (insert other open weights model here)? There is no training cost for that.

1. Someone is still paying for that cost.

2. “Open source” is great but then it’s just a commodity. It would be very hard to build a sustainable business purely on the back of commoditized models. Adding a feature to an actual product that does something else though? Sure.

There is plenty of money to be made from hosting open source software. AWS for instance makes tons of money from Linux, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, hosting AI models like DeepSeek (Bedrock) etc.