When we started Ollama, we were told how open-source (open-weight wasn't a term back then) will always be inferior to the close-sourced models. This was 2 years ago (Ollama's birthday is July 18th, 2023).
Fast forward to now, open models are quickly catching up, and at a significantly lower price point for most and can be customized for specific tasks instead of being general purpose. For general purpose models, absolutely the closed models are currently dominating.
Depends. API pricing from oss model inference providers basically has to be sustainable, because of competition in the space.
And with that in mind, i definetly dont use more than a couple of bucks a month in API refils. (not that i really am a power user or anything)
So if you consider the 20 bucks to be balanced between poer and non power users, and with the existing rate limits, its probably not that far off being profitable, at least on the pure inference side.
Fast forward to now, open models are quickly catching up, and at a significantly lower price point for most and can be customized for specific tasks instead of being general purpose. For general purpose models, absolutely the closed models are currently dominating.