The only moat openai has is their financial resources to pay for training and their vast troves of data scraped before reddit/twitter/etc started trying to lock things down. I think at this point there are enough people knowledgeable and interested in open LM technology that, if openai begins to degrade in quality, we won’t lose this technology forever.

I’ve personally been obsessively reading papers about new models and transformer modifications, and having succeeded in implementing some I think the experience has taught me that this tech is probably where web was in the 90s: easy in concept, expensive and hard to scale due to a few missing easy pieces thatll come later.