Oh I definitely agree that there are multiple levels of AI research that are valuable. Huge supporter of open source, and not meaning to talk down to anyone working on AI projects.
It's just that at the moment I'm finding the open source LLM community hard to contextualize from an outside perspective. Maybe it's because things are moving so fast (probably a good thing).
I just know that personally, I'm not going to be exploring any projects until I know they're near or exceeding GPT-4 performance level. And it's hard to develop an interest in anything else other than GPT-4 when comparison is so tough to begin with.