GPT-4 is so much better for complex tasks that I wouldn't use anything else. Trying to get 3.5 to do anything complicated is like pulling teeth, and using something worse than 3.5... Oof.

TBH this feels like cope from Google; Bard is embarrassingly bad and they expected to be able to compete with OpenAI. In my experience, despite their graph in the article that puts them ahead of Vicuna-13B, they're actually behind... And you can't even use Bard as a developer, there's no API!

But GPT-4 is so, so much better. It's not clear to me that individual people doing LoRa at home is going to meaningfully close the gap in terms of generalized capability — at least, not faster than OpenAI itself improves its models. Similarly, StableDiffusion's image quality progress has in my experience stalled out, whereas Midjourney continues to dramatically improve every couple months, and easily beats SD. Open source isn't a magic bullet for quality.

Edit: re: the complaints about Midjourney's UI being Discord — sure, that definitely constrains what you can do with it, but OpenAI's interface isn't Discord, it has an API. And you can fine-tune the GPT-3 models programmatically too, and although they haven't opened that up to GPT-4 yet, IME you can't fine-tune your way to GPT-4 quality anyway with anything.

"There's no moat" and "OpenAI is irrelevant" feel like the cries of the company that's losing to OpenAI and wants to save face on the way out. Getting repeated generational improvements without the dataset size and compute scale of a dedicated, well-capitalized company is going to be very tough. As a somewhat similar data+compute problem, I can't think of an open-source project that effectively dethroned Google Search, for example... At least, not by being better at search (you can argue that maybe LLMs are dethroning Google, but on the other hand, it's not the open source models that are the best at that, it's closed-source GPT-4).