> Why would they want to give out their trusty LLMs

OpenAI won’t want to; open source competitors already are, and they will keep getting better. The more of a lead OpenAI has over commercial competitors, the more incentive those commercial competitors will have to back open source options.

Running locally and “give you” are two very different things. Financially you paid for the phone. From a lock in point of view the chip will be proprietary and very hard to reverse engineer. They can indeed hide it behind a local API that apps that they can ban at will would need to use.