I think we'll eventually find a way to make the cycle smaller, so instead of writing a stackoverflow post in 2024 and using a model trained on it in 2025 I'll be contributing to the expertise of a distributed-model-ish-thing on Monday and benefitting from that contribution on Tuesday.

When that happens, the most powerful AI will be whichever has the most virtuous cycles going with as wide a set of active users as possible. Free will be hard to compete with because raising the price will exclude the users that make it work.

Until then though, I think you're right that open will lag.