Eventually can be (and has been) bankrolled by Nvidia. They did a lot of ground-floor research on GANs and training optimization, which only makes sense to release as public research. Similarly, Meta and Google are both well-incentivized to share their research through Pytorch and Tensorflow respectively.

I really am not expecting Apple or Microsoft to discover AGI and ferret it away for profitability purposes. Strictly speaking, I don't think superhuman intelligence even exists in the domain of text generation.

Well, that's because the potential reward from picking the right horse is MASSIVE and the cost of potentially missing out is lifelong regret. Investors are driven by FOMO more than anything else. They know most of these will be duds but one of these duds could turn out to be life changing. So they will keep bankrolling as long as they have the money.

Sort of yes, sort of no.

Of course, I agree that Stability AI made Stable Diffusion freely available and they're worth orders of magnitude less than OpenAI. To the point they're struggling to keep the lights on.

But it doesn't necessarily make that much difference whether you openly share the inner technical details. When you've got a motivated and well financed competitor, merely demonstrating a given feature is possible, showing the output and performance and price, might be enough.

If OpenAI adds a feature, who's to say Google and Facebook can't match it even though they can't access the code?