In the OSS donations war (Visual Studio Code being a really fascinating example of it) you could see that the taps can't be turned off so easily. Whatever is donated can be built upon forever.

I think there will come a point, soon enough, where open weights models are capable enough that even if they stagnate, they can be augmented with tooling that essentially keeps them current. Maybe we are there now?

But the risk of the taps being turned off is not negligible.

My own feeling is that governments will ultimately ask consortia of universities to train open weights models and support them financially in doing so.

(And for what it is worth, I think diffusion text models are likely to trigger a hardware arms race that makes this possible)

In much the same way that they used to do that for the supercomputer race, which we just don't hear about right now!