[javajosh]

History is littered with great software that died because no-one used it because the business model was terrible. Capturing $1B of value is better than 0, and everyone understands this. And who cares what history thinks anyway?

OpenAI has spent a lot of money to get their result. It's safe to assume it will take a lot of money to get a similar result, and then to share it (although I assume bit torrent will be good enough). Once people are running their models, they can innovate to their hearts content. It's not clear how or why they'd give money back to the enabling technology. So how does money flow back to the innovators in proportion to the value produced, if not a SaaS?