what's weirdest to me (and i agree with you) is that it could ALSO be true that a highly competently managed, highly capitalized closed source and weights model training on tons of real-world data non-stop COULD stay ahead of open weights models, and that lead COULD grow. now, how competent (much less merciless) the frontier-blazing U.S. corporations will be able to be long-term ... i suspect they are right to be nervous and highly focused on optics, regardless of the truth :)