There's no moat to any of this shit, and they have to try to do something about that. Everybody involved is deeply, deeply, in debt. Watching these things work make it easy to figure out what they're doing.

The clock is ticking. People pretending that normal people can't afford to do AI at home, in private, are making the argument that cars are too expensive for normal people to own. Pretty sure right now if you spend $25K, you would be able (if there were no technical hurdles) to set up a private rig that would satisfy your family's need for LLM assistance for the foreseeable future. That's a budget-priced car, and the price is only going to go down (i.e. that rig will become more powerful over time.) If all of those people donated some of their cycles and bandwidth to a networked training grid, the models would stay current.

The "open source" infrastructure for that is lacking, but not for long.

These companies own nothing that couldn't be implemented by a specialist after another specialist explained it to them over a phone call. And due to the nature of LLMs, they can't even use copyrights and patents as weapons. The only options are secrecy and government protection. And secrecy is only a delaying tactic.