Why Probabl signed the Open Weights open letter
By François Méro, CEO of Probabl
Probabl has signed the Open Weights and American AI Leadership open letter alongside Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, Mistral, GitHub, Hugging Face, and over 270 other companies.
Together, we are standing up for the open AI ecosystem.
The letter makes a straightforward case: AI leadership will be judged not by any single frontier model, but by whether we build a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses advanced AI into every sector of the economy and to every enterprise, no matter how small or big.
That argument is close to home for us. Probabl is the tabular AI company by the founders of scikit-learn, the global open standard for machine learning used by millions of data scientists in enterprises, labs, and public institutions around the world every single day.
Open, shared foundations in AI aren’t an abstract principle for us; they are how our work has created value for the global community of tabular AI practitioners.
The arguments that resonate with us
The letter draws a direct line from the open source software movement to today’s choices about AI. Three of its points speak directly to how we think about tabular AI:
An open AI ecosystem makes advanced AI accessible to every sector. A strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector is essential for creating opportunities for scientific breakthroughs, innovation, and prosperity. Open weight models – i.e. models that anyone can download, inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure – make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available.
Expanding access to the AI economy. Startups, large enterprises, universities, and public institutions can build on advanced models without training one from scratch or paying frontier-model prices for every task. Open weights let every organization match the right model to the right job at the right cost, reserving frontier-scale capability for genuine frontier problems, and running efficient, specialized models everywhere else.
More control, less lock-in, for enterprises. As enterprises invest in AI, they want to know they won’t become locked into a single provider or lose the knowledge and capabilities they build over time. Open weights let organizations own their data, adapt models to their own needs, and deploy them wherever their requirements demand.
Openness is pushing the frontier of tabular AI
frontier of tabular AI, especially tabular foundation models (TFMs). Teams like Soda - Inria and Prior Labs are not only releasing the open weights of SOTA TFMs TabICL and TabPFN but also open source code and detailed technical reports that enable data scientists to use, study, experiment with, modify, build on top of, and redistribute each other’s work.
As Gael Varoquaux and Cailean Osborne wrote on our blog recently, this is the open science flywheel in action in tabular AI. Doubling down on the enablers of that flywheel is exactly why the open letter matters to us.
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