I suspect Open Source LLMs will outpace the release version of GPT-4 before the end of this year.
It's less likely they will outpace whatever version of GPT-4 is shipped later this year, but still very much possible.
That's exactly the core of the email that leaked out of Google: it's proving far better to be able to have lots of people iterating quickly (which necessarily means broad access to the necessary hardware) than to rely on massive models and bespoke hardware.
I'd anticipate something along the lines of a breakthrough in guided model shrinking, or some trick in partial model application that lets you radically reduce the number of calculations needed. Otherwise whatever happens isn't as likely to come out of the open source LLM community.
Very true, but can't Google just wait and take from the open-source-LLM community the findings, then quickly update their models on their huge clusters? It's not like they will lose the top position, already done that.