Timothy Prickett Morgan examines the competitive dynamics between proprietary closed-source AI models, open-weight models, and fully open-source alternatives. He argues that as open models close the performance gap through techniques like distillation, closed-model vendors will struggle to justify premium pricing unless they maintain a clear quality edge. Morgan predicts that hardware providers such as Nvidia stand to benefit most from this dynamic, since compute retains its value regardless of which class of model ultimately wins market share.
