I think it's market leadership which is just free word of mouth advertising which can then lead to consulting business or maybe they can cheek in some ads in llm directly oh boy you don't know.

Also I have seen that once a open source llm is released to public, though you can access it on any website hosting it, most people would still prefer it to be the one which created the model.

Deepseek released its revenue models and it's crazy good.

And no they didn't have full racks of h100.

Also one more thing. Open source has always had an issue of funding.

Also they are not completely open source, they are just open weights, yes you can fine tune them but from my limited knowledge, there is some limitations of fine tuning so owning that training data proprietary also helps fund my previous idea of consulting other ai.

Yes it's not a much profitable venture,imo it's just a decently profitable venture, but the current hype around ai is making it lucrative for companies.

Also I think this might be a winner takes all market which increases competition but in a healthy way.

What deepseek did with releasing the open source model and then going out of their way to release some other open source projects which themselves could've been worth a few millions (bycloud said it), helps innovate ai in general.