The author is overly optimistic with the current state of open source LLMs, (e.g., Koala is very far away from matching ChatGPT performance). However, I agree with their spirit, Google has been one of the most important contributors to the development of LLMs and until recently they've been open sharing their model weights under permissive licenses, they should not backtrack to closed source.

OpenAI has a huge lead in the closed source ecosystem, Google's best bet is to take over the open source ecosystem and build on top of it, they are still not late. Llama based models don't have a permissive license, and a free model that is mildly superior to Llama could be game changing.