You _do_ understand everything we've seen from OpenAI Google already showed us they have? Not to mention OG research and being the primary r&d force behind vast majority of AI you're seeing. They haven't put it in hands of users as directly yet though, reasons to be speculated upon.

Sounds a lot like Xerox and GUIs, Microsoft and Web 2.0, Microsoft and smartphones, etc

I must say that both of your and parent's points are very enlightening.

Yours in that from it follows, that there's still quite a bit of room to get ahead of OpenAI for smaller players.

Parent's in that in order to achieve above one can just leverage the public papers produced by bigger research labs.

Depends on the timescale.

I have the feeling that smaller players are about as likely to get past GPT-n family in the next 2-3 years as I am to turn a Farnsworth Fusor into a useful power source.

Major technical challenges that might be solvable by a lone wolf, in the former case to reduce the data/training requirements and in the latter to stop ions wastefully hitting a grid.

But in 10 years the costs should be down about 99%, which turns the AI training costs from "major investment by mega corp or super-rich" into "lottery winner might buy one".

This tech is capital-intensive even when you know how to do it.

I heard estimates in tens of $M. That's rather available.

Isn't that quite a lot of other-than-personnel cost for a software startup? And how many iterations do you throw away before you get one that generates income?

I did not necessarily mean 10 people startups. There are quite a few companies smaller than OpenAI, but much larger than 10 people.

Yeah, especially since there's a Stripe Amazon partnership piece on the front page right now, and Amazon Pay's right there.