Going to call BS on this. I've delivered multiple projects this year using open models.
Very curious about the type of projects you've delivered.
I'm a sample of 1 and also relatively inexperienced. But I felt I quickly reached the limits of what was possible when I tried doing sentence classification with OSS sentence embedding models. The issue was with negation. I'd attributed too much magic to embedding models - they don't really understand language.
Not to say there isn't very capable tech out there. Just to add a datapoint that "sentiment analysis"-like approaches in blogs don't always scale to your particular use-case.
Edit: conscious I've drifted from the topic of chatbot type models, but felt relevant somehow.