I agree we need more alternatives. I'm a fan of open-source/self-hosted AIs, but I think it's healthy for venture backed companies to invest heavily in productizing SOTA models. Ideally we get these tools into the hands of more people sooner and we will learn how far we need to push these models to get the results we need/want.
Maybe there are diminishing returns at some scale and open-source/self-hosted is able to approach the best private corp stuff.
If my hypothesis plays out the SOTA model builders aren't particularly advantaged at this collab layer. Who creates the collab layer and is it open source (e.g. Nostr-based?) are the most important questions in my mind.