OpenAI had worse models (GPT 5.2 and 5.4) at that time. But now the tables have turned. Would Anthropic face a similar situation since Opus 4.7 falls below expectations?
Open source models currently look good on paper, but the flagship models are still quite huge and cannot be run efficiently on consumer hardware, thus having the same inference hosting cost issues (I'm assuming OpenAI and Anthropic has done a shit ton of optimizations already on their servers.) The main breakthrough needed is plainly cheaper and more efficient hardware (such as TPUs or Huawei Ascends), and how to scale infrastructure quickly without losing money.