Maybe you can recommend some of those models? I'm honestly bewildered - what is open and not?

I don’t think doing that will change anything. Only real options - without a career shift - that I’ve identified are to work for companies building something that’s never been built before, or building a SaaS that serves a niche.

How stopping using hyperscalers models on their infra would "get as much of this capability into the open as possible"?

Either "we" create models better than commercial state of the art (by using whatever means).

Or we use open models AND fund organisations building such models (could be by purchasing service from these orgs or donations - in which case would these orgs be different than hyperscalers?).

But i dont see how just hosting the models on some private servers would give us an edge?

Or, use the best tools to make the best products you can and stake your claim before all the low hanging fruit is picked

Have fun trying to afford the necessary hardware to run open models acceptably. The big labs are trying to make sure we won’t be able to in short order.