At the tail end of 2023 I was deeply worried about consolidation of power, because OpenAI were the only lab with a GPT-4 class model and none of their competitions had produced anything that matched it in the ~8 months since it had launched.

I'm not worried about that at all any more. There are dozens of organizations who have achieved that milestone now, and OpenAI aren't even definitively in the lead.

A lot of those top-class models are open weight (mainly thanks to the Chinese labs) and available for people to run on their own hardware.

I wrote a bunch more about this in my 2024 wrap-up: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#the-gpt-...