I've thought about this too. I do agree that open source models look good and enticing, especially from a privacy standpoint. But these solutions are always going to remain niche solutions for power users. I'm not one of them. I can't be hassled/bothered to setup that whole thing (local or cloud) to gain some privacy and end up with an inferior model and tool. Let's not forget about the cost as well! Right now I'm paying for Claude and Gemini. I run out of Claude tokens real fast, but I can just keep on going using Gemini/GeminiCLI for absolutely no cost it seems like.

The closed LLMs with the biggest amount of users will eventually outperform the open ones too, I believe. They have a lot of closed data that they can train their next generation on. Especially the LLMs that the scientific community uses will be a lot more valuable (for everyone). So in terms of quality, the closed LLMs should eventually outperform the open ones, I believe, which is indeed worrisome.

I also felt anxious early december about the valuations, but, one thing remains certain. Compute is in heavy demand, regardless of which LLM people use. I can't go back to pre-AI. I want more and more and faster and faster AI. The whole world is moving that way it seems like. I'm invested into phsyical AI atm (chips, ram, ...) whose evaluations look decently cheap.