Yes there will, that's the problem HN User Minimaxir is talking about.

It will only get less and less expensive for Microsoft in terms of cost. And more and more effective for Microsoft in terms of results delivered.

How do you compete with free? That's the question. The previous internet experience has already shown us that "also be free" is not really a sustainable or even effective answer. You have to be better in some fundamental dimension.

What makes you think open ai won't look at the FOSS improvements, include them in their tech, and make their GPU farm way cheaper, rendering their service even more competitive?

Not to mention it's easy to run stable diffusion, but midjourney is still a good business. I can run sd on my laptop, I still pay for midjourney because it's convenient, the out of the box experience is better than any competition, and it keeps improving.

that's like saying that apple and MS can look into linux and steal ideas. Yes they can do that but it doesnt make linux any less useful. If anything they learned to contribute back to the common pile, because everyone benefits from it. It would be a problem if this was a one-way relationship , which it doesnt seem to be. If Open source is making them more money, why kill it

You are making my point: linux, mac and windows coexist, despite the overwhelming strength of open source, and the proprietary platforms are quite profitable.

But the point is not to kill commercial software because then OSS will die too because people will have to find other jobs

I mean, read the article, the author is concerned about that, and wants Google to open source more so it's not just Facebook's lama that gets open source building on it.

The reason why proprietary software ever had a moat simply comes down to: software startups could dump investment capital onto the development process and achieve results much faster, with better user interfaces, allowing them to achieve path dependence in their customer base. Thus we had a few big application verticals that were ultimately won by MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, etc.

If the result here is as marginal as it seems - a few months of advantage in output quality and a slightly more sleek UI - the capital-intensive play doesn't work. The featuresets that industrial users want the most depend on having more control over the stack, not on UI or output quality. The open source models are stepping up to this goal of "cheap and custom". Casual users can play with the open models without much difficulty either, provided they take a few hours to work through an installation tutorial - UI isn't a major advantage when the whole point is that it's a magic black box.

> Casual users can play with the open models without much difficulty either, provided they take a few hours to work through an installation tutorial

That can be quite a barrier for entry for non-powerusers. I wouldn't underestimate serving casual users, considering that the alternative is OSS i.e. giving your shit away for free.