Stop Waiting, Start Shipping: Real-World Strategy for Open-Source LLMs

Alexander Hendorf and Sebastian Raschka sit down for a fireside chat on the current state of open-source LLMs.

With Chinese models like DeepSeek and Qwen competing directly with Llama and Mistral, the choice of capable open-source models has never been wider — so why are so many teams still waiting for the next generation instead of building with what is already here?

Questions we want to discuss:

• What role do Chinese and American OSS models play in the current competitive landscape?
• Where do open-source models still fall short of proprietary ones, and where has the gap closed?
• What biases should practitioners be aware of and how to handle them?
• Are AI agents a fundamental shift or are we seeing diminishing returns?
• What deployment strategies actually work — especially for European teams that rely on talent and domain expertise rather than hyperscaler compute?

Half the session is reserved for audience questions.