From the point of view of academia, free transformative products that build on other stuff, transparency, possibility of building even better models in the future and a big etc, there's NO difference between ms excel and Google sheets.
OTOH, the llama models have allowed all of the above and has helped us immensely in both developing new things and being able to understand these new generation of LLMs...all of which would be impossible with openai.
Open weight means you get both the details of the architecture and a way to freely iterate to build new things.