> is it really unthinkable that another oss/local model will be released by deepseek, alibaba, or even meta that once again give these companies a run for their money

Plenty of OSS models being released as of late, with GLM and Kimi arguably being the most interesting for the near-SOTA case ("give these companies a run for their money"). Of course, actually running them locally for anything other than very slow Q&A is hard.