GoKawiilIBM's Krishna: open weight AI models now match frontier models at a fraction of cost
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told investors on the company's Q3 earnings call that open weight AI models, which scored far below closed frontier models in 2024 benchmarks, have closed much of that performance gap by late 2025. He said open models now deliver roughly 90 percent of frontier model performance at 10 to 25 percent of the token cost, and argued this makes them suitable for most routine enterprise tasks like summarizing emails or reviewing contracts.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
Krishna's comments suggest IBM sees rising enterprise demand for smaller, cheaper on-prem AI deployments rather than reliance on costly frontier models, which could reshape where AI infrastructure spending flows. His remark that many businesses lack the specialized staff to deploy such systems hints that IBM may be positioning itself to sell services and expertise around setting up these on-prem clusters.
- Open weight models reportedly closed the performance gap with closed frontier models from roughly 70-to-20/30 in 2024 to 70-to-50 by late 2025, according to Krishna.
- Krishna claims open models now cost 10 to 25 percent as much as frontier models while delivering about 90 percent of their performance.
- IBM sees growing enterprise interest in on-prem AI infrastructure, which Krishna says can often be built with just two or three server racks but requires specialized technical expertise.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU — If you're intrigued by running open-weight AI models on-prem like IBM's CEO describes, a powerful GPU like the RTX 4090 is the consumer-level starting point for local LLM inference. Its large VRAM pool lets enthusiasts and small businesses experiment with open models such as Llama or Mistral without cloud API costs. It's a great way to see firsthand the cost-performance tradeoff Krishna is talking about.
See NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: theregister.com — Simon Sharwood, 2026-10-26
Published there as: “IBM CEO says open weight models are now good and cheap on-prem”
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