So their idea of open weight models is just unrestricted (less regulaton) models that they still host, and they will still collect all your data. They still need to build data centers. Money is getting made regardless of if it hurts the economy, if they are needed/wanted, and if its even profitable. Because eventually the american people will foot the bill.
What they don't like is just a model that you can download and run offline anytime you want. If they do its going to be baked into windows as a monthly subscription to use the service, then you select from a drop down list of models to use for whatever task. They can bake a defussion model into Microsoft paint or whatever. You can do the same with krita/photoshop via plugins. So they will charge you a monthly fee to use your own hardware/compute.
The only reason they are pulling this now is because everytime they release some "big crazy disruptive" ai model the wind is taken out of their sails by the Chinese models. Sure you can argue no one has 15k for a PC with 128gigs ram/vram to run some of these models at their full capability, but you can quantize and retrain the models to work on less parameters. So you could work get a model to run on a 8gig GPU which is pretty common and if trained properly it can be decent at specific tasks.
They want to reposition themselves now that its obvious no one wants to generate slop with sora/chatgpt and it will never turn a profit. They are trying to reframe themselves as being nessisary for the greater good and some how if its a "open" model that its fine. But much like how googles android is "open" there are always ways to exert control with it to the point its locked down. For the model to truely be open, its even less profitable to these companies like openai. Nvidia can at least profit off people running local Ai models.
Also its in talks that we might nationalize Ai which is part of this reframing and their way to get more access to money, and power. We are already having a hard time not letting these Ai companies not absorb all of our goverment data, if we nationalize them they are just going to get all that data, and start removing welfare on a weaponized scale. We won't have to bail them out because it will just become this infinitly inflating budget worse than the mitary budget. And in the name of "socalisim, and effiecency" they'll just end up cutting all welfare programs including social security, food, healthcare for UBI. And UBI will be something like 600 dollars a month so you will be in a worse off position, and receive less benifits overall, but all that money the goverment saves will go straight into the Ai budget.