[bobbob27]

You can't just take cost of training out of the equation...

If these companies plan to stay afloat, they have to actually pay for the tens of billions they've spent at some point. That's what the parent comment meant by "free AI"

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, you can - because of LLama.

Training is expensive, but it's not that expensive either. It takes just one of those super-rich players to pay the training costs and then release the weights, to deny other players a moat.

[assuagering]

If your economic analysis depends on "one of those super-rich players to pay" for it to work, it isn't as much analysis as wishful thinking.

All the 100s of billions of $ put into the models so far were not donations. They either make it back to the investors or the show stops at some point.

And with a major chunk of proponent's arguments being "it will keep getting better", if you lose that what you got? "This thing can spit out boilerplate code, re-arrange documents and sometimes corrupts data silently and in hard to detect ways but hey you can run it locally and cheaply"?