IBM CEO says open weight models are now irresistibly good and cheap on-prem

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has told investors that open weight models now make brilliant sense for on-prem enterprise use.

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.

The CEO said open weight models currently deliver “anywhere from 25 percent to 10 percent of the token cost of the frontier models. That is very attractive given that they’re now 90 percent as effective.”

“It’s a simple question for any enterprise. Would you like something that’s 10 percent of the cost if it’s 90 percent as good as the best, …