They certainly are capable (DeepSeek being the obvious example), the problem is that they're still too expensive to run and there's no currently differentiator to compete with the big players who are likely selling inference at a loss.

LLMs are natural language models (what words are likely to come next given the context), not any sort of AGI. For that purpose, the gap between open and closed models is closing much faster in LLMs than CAD. I think LLMs will go the way of chess engines -- one of these models will become the Stockfish of LLMs and the proprietary models will end up being a waste of money and resources.

I think LLMs might follow this market pattern where you can buy something to host yourself and then commoditization happens enough where open source solutions will also evolve to have good enough solutions.

An idea for a disrupting company would be to open source their LLM and offer support and feature development to enterprises as the paid offering, kinda like Red Hat or others doing that model. A key difference is running an LLM locally on decent sized compute is fine but it will be costly to scale on your own.

For what it's worth, I absolutely share your concerns around the fact that LLM models are now proprietary. I want to see more open-source (or at least open-weight) models being built