The lesson
The pot remembers school
Every dish I serve carries a memory of school. My twenty years in kitchens taught me the basics: fire, salt, timing. No cook is born knowing those. The AI models you use went to school too, and their school was enormous.
School first, coaching after
The training happens in two stages. Pre-training is the school: the model reads enormous amounts of text to learn language itself, how words follow words, before it learns any one job. It is expensive, slow, and usually someone else’s. The model that comes out of school is called a foundation model, and it arrives already skilled. Fine-tuning is the coaching after school: you train it a little more on your style, your format, your task, using far less data and money than building one from scratch. Then there is the question of the kitchen doors. A closed model is ordering at the hatch: you use it through the owner’s service and never see inside. Open weights is the dish plus the recipe card: you can download the model, run it, adjust it, while the training data and full method stay secret. Open source is the open kitchen itself: weights, code and data details are released, and you watch it cook.
When the menu changes
The menu changes whether you watch it or not. The regulars’ tastes drift, and a model that was right in January can be wrong by June. The street changes, the model does not, and slowly the answers stop fitting. The fix is monitoring and retraining, not blame.
3 kitchens, 3 doors
Three kitchens stand on my counter. Kitchen one: you order through the hatch, and you never see inside. Kitchen two: you get the dish and the recipe card, but not the shopping list. Kitchen three: you are invited into the kitchen itself. Name the three doors. I give you three seconds.
Pause here for three seconds.
Show the answer
… Closed model. Open weights. Open source.
The one you order from is closed. The one with the recipe card is open weights. The one that lets you watch is open source. And every one of them, no matter how open, still needs a fresh look at the menu now and then.