Open-Source vs Closed-Source LLMs. What should you actually use?

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Open-weight or closed-source LLMs? Learn when to use each for AI agents, comparing reasoning, cost, privacy, licensing, self-hosting, and infrastructure.
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For most AI agent developers, the best choice is a hybrid approach: use frontier closed-source models for complex reasoning and open-weight models for high-volume, repetitive workloads like embeddings, reranking, extraction, and small-model generation. The right choice depends on reasoning requirements, data privacy, workload volume, infrastructure, and licensing.