Running isn’t necessarily the issue. The moat is creating a high-quality model like OpenAI has, which (and here the article is mistaken) doesn’t seem to be easily reproducible.

While that's true, it also seems entirely predictable at this point how to do that. It takes a lot of effort and expensive hardware, but there isn't really a "secret sauce" beyond expertise in the field.

Yes, but it takes time (took OpenAI years) and significant effort. Who with enough expertise will do this and not keep the results closed in order to monetize them? It doesn’t seem like something an open source project could accomplish quickly enough to not keep lagging substantially behind the commercial solutions.

That's going to get easier too. Stanford can already get this far for $600, so soon after the major GPT-based chat AIs were released. Imagine how much better it will get with just a little bit more time.

Sounds like IBM trusting no one would copy their BIOS code.

Governments can ban powerful devices, as they can ban guns, bombs, and such.

Only at a price. If you ban devices powerful enough to run ChatGPT, you ban a big chunk of what powers your economy.