There are models with open training as well as weights. It's not chatgpt, but that trained model can be fully audited and reused without further training. I think for most daily use I'd be fine using a greatly outdated model. Open source has always relied on contributors eating costs—even just the opportunity cost of contributing time.
FLOSS software is slow, much slower than VC-funded explosive growth, but it's hard to compete with in the long term.
It'll get increasingly difficult for open models to keep up with proprietary frontier models as the costs involved increase. Yes, there will always be older open models available, but at some point, they just won't be as competitively useful.
Your code assistant that can output a file's worth of code will pale in comparison to systems that can create entire projects in seconds. If it costs billions to reproduce the latter, who's going to do it and give it away for free?
There's a possible solution here in the form of distributed training, but that's still tentative and will always be at a lag to the centralised training the big players can do.
Why not Deepseek? Sometimes rich tech bros have billion dollar hobbies instead of billion dollar yachts or billion dollar foundations. Just takes a few not monetarily motivated but has more money then sense visionaries types willing to turn their very, very expensive hobbies into charities. Now if we enter the 100s of billions / trillions territory...
facebook has also taken the approach of undercutting and betting on subdizing their other products. It's a risky bet to assume the llm tech itself will last long as a moat.
Depends on if DeepSeek is llm business foremost VS hobby founder is willing to sink obscene resources into simply for personal fulfillment and the lulz. Maybe deepseek will become the core business / primary money maker vs highflyer hedgefund. Or maybe Deepseek continues to be expensive yacht or car collection where protecting the moat doesn't matter. Maybe founder gets more fulfillment doing the work and inspiring others i.e. Liang was pretty explicit he wanted to see a world where PRC innovates and contributes to global standards instead of merely following. In the meantime, seems like Deepseek isn't loss-making, so it's not even prohibitive hobby yet. But it's not outside of realm of possiblity that rich bro simply dgaf about returns on passion project funded by his primary income stream.
FLOSS software is slow, much slower than VC-funded explosive growth, but it's hard to compete with in the long term.