Glossary / LLM APIs and AI
Glossary · LLM APIs and AI · checked Oct 24, 2026
Open weights
Short answerAn open-weights model publishes its trained weights so anyone can download and run it (Llama, DeepSeek, Mistral, Qwen). That is not the same as open source: training data and code may stay closed, and licenses vary.
Why it matters
Open weights let you run a model on your own hardware, which trades API bills for GPU costs and keeps data in-house.
Our number
DeepSeek is the open-weights provider in our LLM price table, priced through its own API; the VRAM calculator covers running such models yourself.
Go deeper on this site
Where it shows up here
It appears on 9 pages of this site: 5 Articles, 4 paths. A few to start with:
- Rust, LLMs, AI agents and app dev, with the receipts.
- Meta open-sourced an 816B model. Running it takes about 1TB of RAM
- Reading paths.
- AI API costs, and how to cut them.
Sources
- Open Source Initiative: open weights: opensource.org/ai/open-weights (checked Oct 24, 2026)
Related terms
Up next
Go deeperVRAM calculatorThe page on this site that does the most with this term.Read it next →Did this answer your question?