Meta doesn't interact with its users in very obvious ways which MS, Google do. All its models magic happen behind the scenes. Meta can continue to release 2nd best models to undercut others and them going far too ahead. And Open Source community will take it from there. Dall-E is dead.

And if all open source extends their models, they can accrue those benefits back to themselves. This is already how they’ve become such a huge player in machine learning (open sourcing amazing stuff).

I think Dall-E isn't actually dead, but was merely renamed Bing Image Creator.

> And, if Meta were to wrestle away OpenAI's moat, they'd eagerly create their own

Meta is already capable of monetizing content generated by the models: these models complement their business and they could not care less which model you're using to earn them advertising dollars, as long as you keep the (preferably high quality) content coming.

> And, if Meta were to wrestle away OpenAI's moat, they'd eagerly create their own, given the opportunity.

At which point the new underdogs would have an interest in doing to them what they're doing to OpenAI.

Assuming progress for LLMs continues at a rapid pace for an extended period of time. It's not implausible that they'll get to a certain level past which non-trivial progress is hard, and if there is an open source model at that level there isn't going to be a moat.