Revision history
for If the Big Labs Block You: Every Alternative That Trains Its Own Models
- correction
Spelled out Japan's ecosystem in the exclusions, after a reader reasonably asked whether Japan has models — the article didn't answer an obvious question.
- Replaced a passing mention of SoftBank with a full Japan entry: Sakana AI (geo-restricted to Japan, and Namazu is post-trained Kimi K2.6/DeepSeek), Preferred Networks PLaMo 3.0 Prime (from scratch, weights private), NTT tsuzumi, Fujitsu Takane (Cohere-based) and Rakuten AI 3.0 (~700B, Apache 2.0, but no subscription to buy).
- rescoped
Broadened from text-only to cover images and video, and merged everything into a single list.
- Dropped a regional section covering services that are not practically purchasable outside their home market.
- Merged everything into one list. The previous pass/fail split and the separate regional section are gone; one table now covers text and code, image and video, with a type column.
- Added image and video generation, which the text-only scope had excluded: Midjourney, Black Forest Labs, Stability AI, Ideogram, Recraft, Krea, Runway, Luma, Pika.
- Kept the exclusion notes, condensed — who’s missing and why is still the substance.
- rewritten
Rescoped and split. The first version mixed US hyperscalers in with independents and collapsed the candidate list without showing the reasoning. Big tech moved to its own article, the pass/fail test was tightened, and the exclusion ledger was published.
- Google, Microsoft and Meta moved to Big Tech AI Subscriptions — they are not an answer to being blocked by a US AI company.
- Added a hard requirement: self-serve signup. If it needs a sales call, a corporate email domain or a five-figure contract, it is not a fallback. This removed Cohere and LG AI Research.
- Removed TII/Falcon (UAE) and Apertus (Switzerland) — the latter is reachable only via a partner platform, so it is effectively self-hosting, not a service.
- Found two shutdowns the first draft would have got wrong: Naver’s CLOVA X closed 9 April 2026 and AI21 halted Jamba development in May 2026.
- Added the dev-tool category the first draft missed — Cognition/Windsurf trains its own SWE models and sells self-serve.
- first published
Original version: four names in the main table (Mistral plus Google, Microsoft and Meta), with sovereign-but-free and enterprise-only options in supporting sections.
Revision tracking was added to this site on 2026-10-05. Entries dated before then were reconstructed from the repository's commit history and deployment logs, so they record what changed but not necessarily every intermediate edit.
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