Last November at Station F, I watched a three-person team from Lyon deploy a fine-tuned 7B model on a single consumer GPU, adapted to French medical terminology, serving diagnostics to rural clinics — no proprietary APIs, under two hundred euros a month.
The Transparency Argument
The urgent case for open weights is practical, not ideological. European regulation — the AI Act, sector-specific compliance in healthcare and finance — demands auditable systems. You cannot audit what you cannot see. Proprietary models turn every compliance question into a trust exercise with a foreign vendor.
“You cannot audit what you cannot see. Proprietary models turn every compliance question into a trust exercise with a foreign vendor.”