That would be a Nuke in the AI world.
The reality: we don't even get public LLM models, let alone source code, while their coffers overfloweth.
Awesome for OpenAI and their employees! Every else goes without. Public benefit my arse.
That they make money incidentally to that is really no problem and a positive because it provides reasonable funding.
What if Firefox made a world beating browser by accident. Would they be justified in closing the source, restricting access and making people pay for it?
That's what OpenAI did.
They don't have moat. Their main advantage have been people and aleady we see entire Anthropic spinoff, Sutskever absent, Karpathy leave, who is next?
I wish they hadn't because they are thinking too commercial (extremely high paid CEO) for instance but they have a foundation to answer to which doesn't manage them like shareholders would (eg not rewarding the CEO for dropping marketshare!). This model is the worst of both worlds imo.
If OpenAI Co. is gatekeeping access to the fruits of OpenAI's labors, what good is OpenAI providing?
Someone took inspiration from this.
Open source staying behind commercial products even if they are technically really close … ? I think I have already seen this.
Dangerous and powerful things like weapons and chemicals are restricted in both physical and informational form for safety reasons. AI needs to be treated similarly.
They have the same moat that Google search has. Including as it pertains to usage and data.
You also can't train a new competitor like OpenAI was able to jumpstart GPT, the gates have already been raised on some of the best data.
Very few companies will be able to afford to keep up with the hyper scale models that are in our future, due to the extreme cost involved. You won't be able to get enough high-end GPUs, you won't be able to get enough funding, and you won't have a global brand that end users recognize and or trust.
The moat expands as the requirements get ever larger to compete with them. Eventually the VC money dries up because nobody dares to risk vaporizing $5+ billion just to get in the ring with them. That happened in search (only Microsoft could afford to fund the red ink competition with Google), the exact same thing will happen here.
Google search produces $100+ billion in operating income per year. Venture capital to go after them all but dried up 15+ years ago. There have been very few serious attempts at it despite the profit, because of the cost vs risk (of failure) factor. A lot of people know how Google search works, there's a huge amount of VC money in the tech ecosystem, Google mints a huge amount of profit - and yet nobody will dare. The winner/s in GPT's field will enjoy the same benefit.
And no, the open source at home consumer models will not come even remotely close to keeping up. That'll be the latest Linux consumer desktop fantasy.
Their sell-out path was hundreds of millions of dollars from GOOG to make their search engine the default, and, unspoken: allow FF to become an ugly, insecure, red-headed stepchild when compared to Chrome.
Likely part of what took priority away from Thunderbird, at the time, too.
Concisely, in any human matteres: Do what you say you'll do, or, add qualifiers/don't say it.
Take funds from a subset of users who need support services or patch guarantees of some kind, use that to pay people to continue to maintain and improve the product.
A bold claim given their track record