Yeah I'd say this has been a big concern ever since it turned out immensely expensive training methods could create effective frontier models. So far at least, open source models have kept up better than I expected, but they definitely lag the top ones and there's no guarantee the gap doesn't widen further.

Imagine the software world if Linux never existed as an effective OS and Microsoft + Apple had completely controlled computer platforms for the past decades. I think it's almost certain that both companies would be even more profitable, and the tech industry would be vastly less free and more dysfunctional .