Open vs Closed LLMs: The Most Expensive Architecture Decision of 2025
Open vs Closed LLMs: The Most Expensive Architecture Decision of 2025 Choosing between open-weight and closed APIs is the new ‘AWS vs on-prem’ — but with triple the consequences. My view is, this choice is not a technical preference. The year is 2025. Every enterprise is an AI enterprise. The core decision for every engineering leader is no longer if to adopt Large Language Models, but how. This choice—between calling a third-party, closed-source API (like OpenAI’s GPT-4o or Anthropic’s Claude 3) and self-hosting an open-weight model (like Llama 3 or Mistral) — has rapidly evolved from a technical preference into the single most impactful architecture decision you will make this year. ...