A leaked paper from Google says that open source models are catching up with Google and OpenAI, and will overtake them. If the author is right the future of AI could be more diverse, more chaotic and less centralized then I had the sense it was likely to end up.
The model that kicked off a lot of the recent open source creativity, LLaMA, was developed by Meta, so the foundational work was likely still costly. But with LLaMA in the public domain, normal developers can build things that run on cheap hardware. Making the area even more exciting.