Open sourcing is the runner-up’s way to ensure the current best player doesn’t steal the whole market. The elephant in the room is obviously the cluster size required, it hardly matters for normal people that the weights are free. We needed more efficiency breakthroughs.
It matters a lot, even if you never intend to run it yourself or look at the code.
It means that people can and will provide this service, and 1000's will build on this and make offers that you can use in either a commodity base market, or with a specific niche target.
It means regulatory capture and control will be much, much harder to execute.
It means AI might continue to be a benefit also to you rather than just a way to control, propagandize and exploit you.
> .. it hardly matters for normal people that the weights are free. We needed more efficiency breakthroughs.
That atleast allows other companies/research labs to develop competing cutting edge LLM technology and come up with efficiency breakthroughs. The alternative is for the tech to be hidden inside OpenAI and FANGs or released as old versions.
