Plausible. But I’ve learned any prognostications on complex systems are far more likely to be wrong than right. Looking forward to connecting these dots in hindsight.
Here's how I think of open-source LLM vs top proprietary ones:
1) Open LLMs will improve at an accelerating pace.
2) However, their gap from the best commercial models will continue to *widen*. This is because OSS community is decentralized and chases different objectives, but big companies are able to concentrate their massive GPU & talent firepower at babysitting a single model, while also learning the best tricks from OSS. GPTs, Claudes, and DeepMind Gemini's will improve at an even faster rate.
I assign < 5% probability that by the time OpenAI releases GPT-5 (let's say in late 2024), any OSS model can even truly match GPT-4 on all tasks that matter. I'd be very, very happy to be proven wrong!
3) OSS LLMs will always have much more diversity. Examples:
- Domain-finetuned models for medical, legal, finance, etc.
- Country-specific models that cater to local cultures and languages.
- Unconstrained models for more creative use cases, like Wizard-7B-Uncensored.