Definition
Industry thesis that enterprises should fine-tune and serve open-weight-models on proprietary data rather than only renting closed frontier APIs — “own the intelligence” behind products. Popularized in 2026 funding narratives by fireworks-ai.
Key Points
- Fireworks claims >95% of served tokens come from specialized/custom models (Jul 2026)
- Economics: open models approaching frontier quality at lower inference cost
- Complements open-model-inference cloud platforms and coding/legal verticals (Cursor Composer, Harvey)
- Distinct from pure foundation-model labs; value accrues to inference + customization stack