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Not everyone likes the idea of proprietary AI, often due to worries about transparency or concerns over how their data is managed and protected.
Although building open-source large language models (LLMs) is not for everyone, many young developers appear drawn to open-source AI, be it using an open-source LLM as a service offering or downloading, customising, and hosting it for their solutions.
A recent survey by Stack Overflow involving over 1,000 developers and technologists shed light on whether young developers are at the forefront of open-source AI and what one can learn from it.
The Shift to Open Source AI
While many of the most popular AI models and chatbot services are not open source, there is a noticeable shift towards open-source AI.
Recently, OpenAI chief Sam Altman confirmed that a powerful new open-weight model with strong reasoning capabilities is coming.
“We are planning to release our first open-weight language model since GPT-2. We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but other priorities took precedence. Now, it feels important to do,” he wrote on X.
While OpenAI might have a hidden agenda behind it, more and more companies are now increasingly adopting an open approach to building AI.
Meta, with its Llama 4 model, is also making an effort to be as open as possible.
The licensing of these models or the approach taken by big AI companies might not fully align with the Open Source Initiative’s definition of open source AI. However, it’s still a step in the right direction.
Moreover, startups in India, such as VOGIC AI, as well as others across the globe, are harnessing open-source AI to build solutions on top of it.
What Do Young Developers Think?
According to the survey, developers expressed interest in activities such as maintaining or giving feedback on open-source projects, engaging with online communities, and interacting with AI chatbots.
The younger participants scored higher in terms of positive engagement with AI. Meanwhile, older respondents had higher negative scores for using proprietary technology at work or school, whereas younger ones had a more positive approach towards AI chatbots. Early-career developers in the survey also pointed out that learning is the highest-rated use case of AI.
Young developers trust open-source AI more than older respondents for learning, personal projects, and creative work.
Soumyadeep Ghosh, a Google Summer of Code contributor at KDE, told AIM, “As a young developer myself, I am still in my learning phase. And AI, just like any other technical tool, always enthuses me. Specifically, how it works, how it is trained, how to refine or finetune it.”
Ghosh revealed that he often ends up fine-tuning existing AI models while trying to incorporate AI in his work. He mentioned training Llama 3.2 1B model on local data, which helped him migrate and transform huge codebases very quickly.
“I couldn’t have been able to do that if the model were closed source,” he highlighted.
Ghosh explained that, as someone who values privacy, he finds it concerning how AI models collect data online and are then trained to offer a more refined version of that same data. “This might look awesome, but for me, it’s a big compromise,” he said.
He cited Satya Nadella’s recent conversation on software as a service (SaaS) and mentioned that SaaS’s potential replacement with agent as a service (AaaS) is possible with open-source models.
“AI is becoming a part of my workforce every single day, and if it remains closed source, it’d be very difficult for me to embrace it, just from the philosophical perspective itself,” Ghosh noted.
Pranav Krishna P, an IT undergraduate, told AIM, “There is a preference among students for open-source AI models, as they enable them to tweak the model according to their will.”
He shared examples of developers self-hosting models like DeepSeek, Llama and others on their personal systems with powerful GPUs. This helps them use it to customise the model based on the application requirements.
He also explained that hosting an open-source model is far more cost-effective than relying on closed-source models with similar capabilities.
As open-source reshapes the future of AI, Cypher 2025, India’s largest AI summit, emerges as a powerful convergence point for innovation and collaboration. It is set to take place from 17–19 September at the KTPO Trade Centre in Whitefield, Bengaluru. In its ninth edition, the event brings together over 5,000 daily attendees, 100+ speakers, and a wave of emerging tech voices. Organised by AIM Media House, Cypher 2025 serves as a pivotal platform for professionals, startups, and enterprises to engage with the evolving AI landscape in India.
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