The more I use Llama 3 the more I think that Zuck may have just killed OpenAI and all other large proprietary AI vendors. The gap between latest GPT4 and Llama 70b is virtually non existent. Even if OpenAI releases GPT5 now, 400b Llama 3 is still training and will most likely be in the same ballpark, again closing the gap between open source and proprietary.
OpenAI has $2b in revenue and is most likely very unprofitable. Meta makes over $100b gross profit. They likely can outspend OpenAI by a factor of at least 10 in terms of compute and talent -- speaking of which, a large majority of AI researchers find open source work a lot more appealing than closed for profit; so very likely top talent will end up at Meta. Google is still caught in the issue of AI killing their main revenue line, so most likely can never go as full in as Meta.
I think the biggest winners from all of this will be application developers, because you can choose any API service that hosts Llama 3, or just host it yourself on your own terms.
So far the majority of AI products have just been glorified wrappers around API endpoints. But if you manage to integrate AI deeply into a product, where the user doesn't even have to think they're interacting with an AI (e.g. behind the scenes calls that adapt to user context, combined with RAG, feeding it your internal API format, multi step reasoning / planning etc), you likely have a very sustainable business that only improves the more advanced the base models become.
But vendor risk / dependency should no longer be a concern for AI developers. Added to that the fact that hardware is only going to get faster / cheaper; there really are endless opportunities to disrupt existing software domains, much of which we're probably not even able to conceive now, but that will seem obvious in hindsight.