---
title: "Open-weights Model"
description: "An open-weights model is a Large Language Model (LLM) whose parameters (or \"weights\") are publicly accessible and can be used and modified without restriction."
canonical_url: "https://promptmetheus.com/resources/llm-knowledge-base/open-weights-model"
---

> Index of every page on this site: [llms.txt](https://promptmetheus.com/llms.txt)

An open-weights model is a [Large Language Model (LLM)](https://promptmetheus.com/resources/llm-knowledge-base/large-language-model-llm) whose parameters (or "weights") are publicly accessible and can be used and modified without restriction.

Unlike closed or [Proprietary Models](https://promptmetheus.com/resources/llm-knowledge-base/proprietary-model), open-weights models are often shared within the AI community for research, educational purposes, or to foster innovation.
They can be [fine-tuned](https://promptmetheus.com/resources/llm-knowledge-base/fine-tuning) or adapted to specific tasks and contribute to the transparency and collaborative advancement of AI technology. Open-weights models can also facilitate reproducibility in AI research,
allowing others to validate and build upon existing work.

Open weights also allow independent deployment optimizations such as [quantization](https://promptmetheus.com/resources/llm-knowledge-base/quantization), which can reduce memory requirements for local or lower-cost inference.

In contrast to [Open-source Models](https://promptmetheus.com/resources/llm-knowledge-base/open-source-model), open-weights models do not provide access to the model architecture or source code for the training pipeline.

In an [interview with Sequoia Capital](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3b-JASoPi0), [Andrej Karpathy](https://x.com/karpathy) used a nice analogy to software, saying "an open-weights model is a little bit like tossing over a binary for an operating system."

Examples of open-weights models are the [LLaMA series](https://developer.meta.com/ai/) by [Meta AI](https://ai.meta.com) and [Mistral 7B](https://mistral.ai/news/announcing-mistral-7b/) / [Mixtral 8x7B](https://mistral.ai/news/mixtral-of-experts/) by [Mistral AI](https://mistral.ai).

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