IBM CEO says open weight models are now irresistibly good and cheap on-prem
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna stated that open-weight AI models are becoming increasingly competitive with closed frontier models at a fraction of the cost. He noted that businesses are showing significant interest in on-premise AI infrastructure to avoid the high costs of proprietary models.
Why it matters
The shift toward cheaper, open-weight models could disrupt the current AI market dominance of major cloud-based model providers.
90 percent of the performance at ten percent of the price, in just two or three racks, is hard to beat
Simon Sharwood Simon Sharwood APAC Editor Published thu 22 Oct 2026 // 05:26 UTC Make us preferred on Google
Speaking on the company’s Q3 earnings call, Krishna said that in 2024 closed frontier models were plainly superior to open alternatives.
“If you ran some assessment, some benchmark, and it was broad-based, not narrow, the top model might score a 70, and the open model might score a 20 or a 30.”
“In late 2025, we began to see that gap shrink, where maybe the gap was not 70 to 20 or 30, it was 70 to 50,” he continued.
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