Open Weights Met Reality This Week. The Verification Layer Is Still Missing.
Photo: Forkast
Between October 15 and October 21, four shipments landed on the open-weight stack that deployers had been waiting on. StepFun’s Step-5-Preview-BF16 weights arrived October 15. NVIDIA shipped Nemotron 3.5 Super VL the same day, with open weights, open datasets, and training recipes. On October 20, DeepSeek opened its production inference engine, and llm-d 1.0 shipped the vendor-neutral serving layer the same day. Licenses moved, engines moved, serving layers moved. One layer did not: nothing shipped that would let anyone outside these companies check what the other four claim. The claims moved at the seller’s speed.
Source: Forkast
