Will open weights make AI more honest?
Of course, none of those safeguards strictly requires open weights. A good developer could build many of them around Claude, Gemini, or another closed API. Still, open weights matter because they let an app provider like FamilySearch or Ancestry control more of the model, not merely the workflow around it: the exact version, the fine-tuning, the inference configuration, the deployment location, and the economics of applying it across billions of records.
This is how the average developer benefits, even when the average developer never downloads a weight. Open source databases mattered to developers who consumed them through managed cloud services. Open-weight models can matter in the same way. They expand what application companies can build and reduce how completely those companies must depend on one model provider’s road map, pricing, and behavior.
The model isn’t the product
My wills are a useful proxy for almost every serious AI application. Replace an 18th-century probate record with an invoice, insurance claim, medical record, legal contract, or codebase. The problem is the same. Plausible output is easy, but no one really wants “plausible” when they’ve asked for “definitive.”
