Open-Assistant, in its current state, is meant to serve as a template for other AIs to be built upon.
Its training data, unlike other AI datasets, does not contain copyrighted content. Every piece of training information was submitted with 100% consent, making it the most ethical dataset in existence. If you build a model with LAION's OA dataset, no one can accuse you of "stealing" from others.
It clearly documents how it works. When OA started, the community mostly speculated about the inner workings of larger AI models. Now, we have a working examples not only from OA, but also other academic sources.
While the project could have continued, a large chunk of contributors, after already doing significant amounts of work, lost interest and left the project. Thus, it makes sense to stop OA here as a working template. The OA project achieved its core goals and can now be the seed for the next generation of ethical AI.
https://youtu.be/gqtmUHhaplo