The difference between metas llama and open ai is akin to the difference between ms excel installed on your machine and google sheets running in the cloud.
Hard disagree and it sounds like you're extrapolating from the traditional software area without considering the nuances.
From the point of view of academia, free transformative products that build on other stuff, transparency, possibility of building even better models in the future and a big etc, there's NO difference between ms excel and Google sheets.
OTOH, the llama models have allowed all of the above and has helped us immensely in both developing new things and being able to understand these new generation of LLMs...all of which would be impossible with openai.
Open weight means you get both the details of the architecture and a way to freely iterate to build new things.
People have different definition of what "freely iterate to build new things" means. For me, having a binary only does not prevent me from doing so.
For example, Minecraft was never distributed with source code, it was binary-only from day one. But the modding community would hard disagree with you if you say there was no way to "freely iterate to build new things", probably in GenZ term, "skill issue" :p
From the point of view of academia, free transformative products that build on other stuff, transparency, possibility of building even better models in the future and a big etc, there's NO difference between ms excel and Google sheets.
OTOH, the llama models have allowed all of the above and has helped us immensely in both developing new things and being able to understand these new generation of LLMs...all of which would be impossible with openai.
Open weight means you get both the details of the architecture and a way to freely iterate to build new things.