"People will not pay for a restricted model when free, unrestricted alternatives are comparable in quality. . ."
I'll take the opposite side of that bet - MSFT / Goog / etc in the providers side will drive record revenues on the back of closed / restricted models:
1 - Table stakes for buying software at enterprise level is permissions based management & standardized security / hardening.
2 - The corporate world is also the highest value spender of software
3 - Corp world will find the "proprietary trained models" on top of vanilla MSFT OpenAI or Goog Bard pitch absolutely irresistible - creates a great story about moats / compounding advantages etc. And the outcome is going to most likely be higher switching costs to leave MSFT for a new upstart etc
I agree with this over the next 10 years but disagree over the next 30.
When/If the innovation slows down, the open source stuff will be able to out compete commercial options. Something like this timeline played out for databases and operating systems.
I'll take the opposite side of that bet - MSFT / Goog / etc in the providers side will drive record revenues on the back of closed / restricted models:
1 - Table stakes for buying software at enterprise level is permissions based management & standardized security / hardening.
2 - The corporate world is also the highest value spender of software
3 - Corp world will find the "proprietary trained models" on top of vanilla MSFT OpenAI or Goog Bard pitch absolutely irresistible - creates a great story about moats / compounding advantages etc. And the outcome is going to most likely be higher switching costs to leave MSFT for a new upstart etc