Open...ish: Why Most ‘Open’ AI Isn’t What You Think

Can you use an AI model without ever really knowing it? In this episode of A Beginner’s Guide to AI, we slice open the debate between open weights and open source — two terms that sound geeky but carry huge consequences for ethics, innovation, and power in the AI world.

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Professor Gephardt breaks it down like a cake recipe: what happens when you get the finished product but not the ingredients? We unpack the difference between access and freedom, spotlight DeepSeek R1 as a strategic case study, and serve up a few spicy thoughts about who’s really in control when AI models are shared — or not.

Whether you're a marketer, a curious techie, or just someone wondering why your chatbot is acting weird, this episode is for you.

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This podcast was generated with the help of ChatGPT, Mistral and Claude 3. We do fact check with human eyes, but there still might be hallucinations in the output. And, by the way, it's read by an AI voice.

Music credit: "Modern Situations" by Unicorn Heads