> You can create your own search ranking algorithm, but you can't crawl the web and serve search results to billions of worldwide users in a few milliseconds.

rephrasing this for LLMs instead of search: "you can create your own model architecture/training method, but you can't crawl the web and serve language query results to billions of worldwide users in a few milliseconds."

that checks out, right? Google/search == """Open"""AI/LLMs still seems like a decent metaphor to me.

I think it's also more than just systems and data centers. it is also difficult to scrape the web the way Google does without using Google IP addresses. a lot of the web now will block you or severely throttle you if you aren't one of the well know engines that they want indexing them.