This is orders of magnitude lower than many companies and government R&D budgets. It's easily financeable by 1000s of independently wealthy people and organizations. It's easily financeable by VC money. This is far cheaper than many other startups or product initiatives that have been tried. There are very likely to be many organizations that build models for the specific purpose of open sourcing the resulting model... the Falcon and Llama models are already proof enough of this
Costs to train equivalent models may increase in the short term due to race towards GPU consumption raising costs... but compute will get cheaper in aggregate over time due to improving compute tech.
And once the model is built it is largely a sunk cost, yes. All that needs to happen is for a single SoTA model to be made open to completely negate any advantage a competitor has. Monetization from LLMs will be driven by focused application of the models, not from providing an interface to a general model. High quality data holds more value than the resulting model
Not every query requires timeliness of data. Incorporating new data into an existing model is likely to be cheaper than retraining the model from scratch, but just speculation on my end.
I think you guys are missing a massive technical consideration which is cost. Training cost, offering cost. As with everything else in tech, outside of the bubble created by ZIRP over the last decade and a half (and the entire two generations of tech workers who never learned this important lesson thus far in their careers), costs matter and are a primary driver of technology success.
If you attached dollar costs to these models above, if the data was available, you’d quickly discover who (if anyone) has a sustainable business model and who doesn’t.
A sustainable model is what determines long term whether w technology is available and whether that leads to further improvement (and increasing sustainability/financial value).