Comment by cosmic_cheese

As a somewhat naive layman in all of this, for a while now in my mind it's been fairly obvious that the methods of the current big western players in the space weren't sustainable and the cat would be forever out of the bag sooner or later.

Open weights are also just one aspect of this. Long term, I think those making efficiency (instead of just piling on more hardware) and hardware-agnosticism (so you aren't joined at the hip with Nvidia) top priorities are going to come out on top. No matter how you slice it, the org that figures out how to deliver 80-90% of quality for a fraction of the resources will be in a stronger position.