Open models will function a lot like Open Source does today, where there are hobby projects, charitable projects, and companies making bad strategic decisions (Sun open sourcing Java), but the bulk of Open AI (open research and models, not the company) will be funded and released strategically by large companies trying to maintain market power.

I'm thinking of models that will take $100 million to $1 billion to create, or even more.

We spend billions on chip fabs because we can project out long term profitability of a huge upfront investment that gives you ongoing high-margin capacity. The current (admittedly early and noisy) data we have about AI models looks very similar IMO.

The other parallel is that the initial computing revolution allowed a large scale shift of business activities from requiring teams of people doing manual activities, coordinated by a supervisor towards having those functions live inside a spreadsheet, word processor, or email.

This replaces a team of people with (outdated) specializations with fewer people accomplishing the same admin/clerical work by letting the computer do what it's good at doing.

I think a similar shift will happen with AI (and other technologies) where work done by humans in cost centers is retooled to allow fewer people to do a better job at less cost. Think compliance, customer support, business intelligence, HR, etc.

If that ends up being the case, donating a few million dollars worth of GPU time doesn't change the larger trends, and likely ends up being useful cover as to why we shouldn't be worried about what the large companies are up to in AI because we have access to crowdsourced and donated models.