Imagine you're a tech company that pays software engineers $200K/year. There is a free open-source coding model that can double their productivity, but a commercial solution yields a 2.1x productivity improvement for $5000 annually per developer. Which do you pick?
Not sure if parent had a certain answer in mind, but my answer is OSS because (1) I can try it out whenever I want, and (2) I don't have the vexing experience of convincing the employer to purchase it.
The existence of the models is making programmers cheaper rather than the reverse.
But i think it is underestimated how important it is for the model to be uncensored. ChatGPT is currently not very useful beyond making fluffy posts. As a public model, they won't be able to sell it for e.g. medical applications because it will have to be perfect to pass regulators. It cannot give finance advice. Censorship for once is proving to be a liability for a tech company.
In-house models OTOH can already do that, and they can be retrained with additional corpus or whatever. And it's not even like they require very expensive hardware.
I find your argument persuasive, companies should spend extra for the significant productivity gain. But then again from experience most companies don’t give you the best tools the market hast to offer..
