> Being open is nice though, even though it doesn't matter that much for folks like me with a single consumer GPU.

The value of open source is not that you will run it locally, it's that anyone can run it at all.

Even if you can't afford to purchase the hardware to run large open source models, someone would, price it at half the cost of the closed source models and still make a profit.

The only reason you are not seeing that happen right now is because the current front-running token-providers have subsidised their inference costs.

The minute they start their enshittification the market for alternatives becomes viable. Without open-source models, there will never be a viable alternative.

Even if they wanted to charge only 80% of what a developer costs, the existence of open source models that are not far behind is a forcing function on them. There is no moat for them.