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.