[otterley]

I think the key question is “when”? In a highly competitive business environment, companies are going to naturally be attracted to the most capable model if it leads to a competitive advantage and the switching costs are low. This suggests that “open” (giving away inference despite ever-higher training costs) may not win for a very long time, if ever.

[rapind]

When frontier models plateau and efficiency increases sufficiently that it becomes a commodity like other cloud compute.

One driver of open models might be foreign actors. With the entire US economy being held up by AI, it's a crucial vulnerability for a capable foreign actor (guess who) to exploit if they wanted to.