The massive head start and amount of capital that Google has going for them. I want open source models to succeed, but it's going to be a large uphill battle.
Discussion
We may see the capability gap between closed and open models expand for a while, but I think the investment in the closed models will actually drag the open model capability up as well, even if it lags. Engineers quit and start their own companies, advance open source models in their free time, etc.
Another way to understand the vast differences in capabilities between BigTech AI and opensource AI, is that BigTech can fake the results and make theirs look much better than it really is.
Open source "AI" can't do this kind of fakery to the same degree, by the nature of being open source. People can verify its capabilities.
Yeah Google has faked the performance of a lot of their tech in past years. It is unprofessional and pathetic and they aren't called out for it enough.