I personally believe that it's more likely that the current batch of massively overleveraged AI companies go broke in the next year or so as the AI bubble bursts. Hopefully the USA manages to get its democratic shit together enough to not bail them out (as happened in 2008), and they just... stop.
The OSS models are almost at the same level, and are progressing fine. The technology continues to be useful, even if all the oligarchs go away.
My spidey sense goes off when we refer to open weight models from Chinese companies trained against frontier models as OSS... as if it was some Torvalds types maintaining a public git repo.
I think those open weight models exist because openai, anthropic, and google rule the roost. And I don't think things would continue as-is if those guys implode.
The technology has certainly moved faster because of all the money thrown at it recently, but it existed before that, and was progressing before that. So no, I think OpenAI, Anthropic only exist because of the open-weight models (that came before them) rather than the other way around. Google is a special case; they invented the transformer and then published it instead of commercialising it, so they actually weren't evil (for once), or they didn't realise what they'd done until too late.
I think things will continue perfectly fine if those guys implode. They didn't invent the technology, they're not the people who are advancing it most (because everything they do is proprietary and undisclosed), and their efforts at commercialising it are just getting in the way of the real research.
I personally believe that it's more likely that the current batch of massively overleveraged AI companies go broke in the next year or so as the AI bubble bursts. Hopefully the USA manages to get its democratic shit together enough to not bail them out (as happened in 2008), and they just... stop.
The OSS models are almost at the same level, and are progressing fine. The technology continues to be useful, even if all the oligarchs go away.