Comment by concats

What about the free open weights models then? And the open source tooling to go with them?

Sure, they are perhaps 6 months behind the closed-source models, and the hardware to run the biggest and best models isn't really consumer-grade yet (How many years could it be before regular people have GPUs with 200+ gigabytes vram? That's merely one order of magnitude away).

But they're already out there. They will only ever get better. And they will never disappear due to the company going out of business or investors raising prices.

I personally only care about the closed sourced proprietary models in so far as they let me get a glimpse of what I'll soon have access to freely and privately on my own machine. Even if all of them went out of business today, LLMs would still have a permanent effect on our future and how I'd be working.