I believe we are still very very early in AI development, so it doesnt even make sense to close models.

Open source and open weights model is how you can harness the potential of all humans to continue development and improving the SOTA of your model. Literally every student on the planet wants to play and improve these models for their own use case.

Plus the ecosystem, once you have users in the ecosystem on your open weight model, this is a giant leverage point in itself

That's not meaningfully different from philanthropy. If Chinese AI products generate sufficient revenue with cheaper marketing strategies, then the incentives for releasing open models will go away.

Right now, there is a shortage of talented researchers, and the attention that open models generate allow them to attract good hires. But this is a fragile dynamic that can break in the future. It's not very different from commercial open source work, except it's much more capital intensive and lower volume.