AI Adoption in Enterprises - Enterprises' adoption of AI is crucial for realizing AI's full potential and impact [2] - Enterprises initially experiment with OpenAI and Anthropic models, often deploying them on Azure or AWS for security and privacy [7] - In 2023, enterprises were "toying around" with AI, but by 2024, 40-50% had production use cases built on closed models [9][10] Challenges with Closed Models - Vendor lock-in is not a primary concern for enterprises due to the increasing number of interoperable models [12][13] - Ballooning costs, especially with agentic use cases involving potentially 50 inference calls per user action, are becoming a significant concern [20] - Enterprises are seeking differentiation at the AI level, not just at the workflow or application level, leading them to consider in-house solutions [21] Reasons for Open Source Model Adoption - Frontier models may not be the right tool for specific use cases, such as medical document extraction, where enterprises can leverage their labeled data to build better models [16][17] - Generic API-based models may not suffice for tasks requiring low latency, such as AI voices or AI phone calls [18] - Enterprises aim to reduce costs and improve unit economics by running models themselves and controlling pricing [20][21] Inference Infrastructure Challenges - Optimizing models for latency requires both model-level and infrastructure-level optimizations, such as speculative decoding techniques like Eagle 3 [23][24][25][26] - Guaranteeing high availability (four nines) for mission-critical inference requires robust infrastructure to handle hardware failures and VLM crashes [27][28] - Scaling up quickly to handle traffic bursts is challenging, with some enterprises experiencing delays of up to eight minutes to bring up a new replica of a model [29]