I would like to live in a world where open source (not just open weights) models dominate the landscape, but I don't see that happening.

The moat is not the quality of the models, but the compute. Any open model that consumers can run will pale in performance compared to SOTA commercially hosted models. There's just no comparison. The really big open models (e.g. DeepSeek, Kimi K2) are much closer, but they're not accessible to most consumers, who still have to rely on companies to provide them.

Maybe this will change one day, but considering how this industry is artificially inflating the cost of hardware, I wouldn't bet on that happening anytime soon. In the meantime, mega-corporations are building out increasingly larger datacenters to meet the demand, and the moat grows.