I don't think a single sample makes a trend. Genuinely asking: what other companies are fully open source and still profitable? Redhat comes to mind, but nothing else, at least no thing on the scale necessary to run AI.

Let's imagine OpenAI open sourced what they were doing and provided training on the technology they've developed, do you think they'd have trouble finding sponsorship ? Honestly?

Sure they can find a sponsor… but Microsoft is spending billions on GPUs for them. Could the sponsor(s) cover those costs?

For better or worse, OpenAI monetizing GPT-3+ has been good for everyone. Hobbyists can’t afford to run the model anyways, and it pushed Google et al to start caring and develop their own models.

We probably wouldn’t have Gemini/LLaMa/etc see the light of day if OpenAI didn’t make LLMs go viral. It’s just disappointing that Google literally had an LLM good enough that was tricking employees into thinking it was sentient, and it took a competitor before they released it publicly.

I used to work for an opensource organization full time. They used to rely on contracting for revenue. It wasnt a lot but it was sufficient to keep the org going for 10 years.

Nowadays the market is much more competitive. "Just find some contracts" is not helpful. Clients expect fast delivery and immediate reactions. I have several people spending their full time on just looking for contracts, and it's still not enough.

If the models Open AI produced were open source, they'd have zero problems raising funding to train those models. Its not about that though, it's about monopolization of the tech.