Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't get where the money for new open source models is going to come from once setting investor dollars on fire is no longer a viable business model. Does anyone seriously expect companies to keep buying and running thousands of ungodly expensive GPUs, plus whatever they spend on human workers to do labelling/tuning, and then giving away the spoils for free, forever?
ads again. somehow. its like a law of nature.
Any kind of media with zero or near zero copying/distribution costs becomes a deflationary race to the bottom. Someone will eventually release something that's free, and at that point nothing can compete with free unless it's some kind of very specialized offering. Then you run into a the problem the OP described: how do you fund free? Answer: ads. Now the customer is the advertiser, not the user/consumer, which is why most media converges on trash.