I'm not so sure thats correct. The Labs seem to offer the best overall products in addition to the best models. And requirements for models are only going to get more complex and stringent going forward. So yes, open source will be able to keep up from a pure performance standpoint, but you can imagine a future state where only licensed models are able to be used in commercial settings and licensing will require compliance against limiting subversive use or similar (e.g. sexualization of minors, doesn't let you make a bomb etc.).

When the market shifts to a more compliance-relevant world, I think the Labs will have a monopoly on all of the research, ops, and production know-how required to deliver. That's not even considering if Agents truly take off (which will then place a premium on the servicing of those agents and agent environments rather than just the deployment).

There's a lot of assumptions in the above, and the timelines certainly vary, so its far from a sure thing - but the upside definitely seems there to me.

What’s the purpose of licensing requiring though things though if someone could just use an open source model to do that anyway? If someone were going to do those things you mentioned why do it through some commercial enterprise tool? I can see maybe licensing requiring a certain level of hardening to prevent prompt injections, but ultimately it still really comes down to how much power you give the model in whatever context it’s operating in.

If that's the case, the winner will likely be cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) who do compliance and enterprise very well.

If Open Source can keep up from a pure performance standpoint, any one of these cloud providers should be able to provide it as a managed service and make money that way.

Then OpenAI, Anthropic, etc end up becoming product companies. The winner is who has the most addictive AI product, not who has the most advanced model.