You might be forgetting the cost to train a 1.8T model.
The cost is peanuts compared to the potential profit. Apple/Google/Facebook could absolutely eat the costs for a skunkworks project to do that training and just sit quietly waiting on the yes/no from legal.
But the question is rather of the cost are peanuts compared to expected cash flow for the next 12 months.
>submarine startups out there sitting on top of full downloads of Common Crawl, archive.org, etc. who are only too happy to let OpenAI be the first penguin off the iceberg.
Not sure any startup would be ok with sitting on a potentially gamechanging model.
Google/Facebook? Maybe?
Amazon's LLM efforts are pretty much in shambles
If OpenAI survives all the legal challenges, they'll just click "Go" and be in business in weeks to months.
If OpenAI gets smacked down, they haven't lost much.
There are probably also some submarine operations that are already doing/have done the training. If OpenAI gets bankrupted for copyright violations, we'll just never hear from those.