Chamath Palihapitiya predicts open source AI dominance within 12 months
As seen on the 24/7 Wall St. homepage on September 19, 2026.
Chamath is betting the value in AI shifts from model owners to the inference clouds serving open weights, and he named four of them. The data he is quoting shows open models at 78.4% of token volume on Vercel's gateway.
Prediction: within 12 months, top three models will be open source. Economic winners will be the American clouds that serve them: Nebius Baseten Together Fireworks https://t.co/IMXjkJxP37 [Quoted @rauchg]: Looks like today may be a record day for token volume % of open models on Vercel AI Gateway: 🟦 Open 78.4% 🟨 Closed 21.6% While spend 💲 usually tells a different story, #3 and #4 today are Moonshot AI & DeepSeek. Adding Z.ai, their combined spend surpasses OpenAI (#2). https://t.co/vFMh3xEt83
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Chamath Palihapitiya is making a pointed call: within 12 months, he expects the top three AI models to be open source. The prediction is notable for its timeline and for where he thinks the money will actually land.
His argument is that the economic spoils will flow to the American cloud providers running inference on open weights rather than to the model developers themselves. He named four specifically: Nebius, Baseten, Together, and Fireworks, positioning them as the infrastructure layer that captures value as the model race commoditizes.
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The post was a direct response to data shared by Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, who reported a record day for open model token volume on the Vercel AI Gateway. Open models accounted for 78.4% of token volume that day.
Rauch also noted that Moonshot AI and DeepSeek ranked third and fourth in token volume, and that when combined with Z.ai their collective spend surpassed OpenAI, which ranked second. That spend data gave Palihapitiya's structural argument a concrete data point to hang on.