In isolation, perhaps we could choose to not develop such large models, but the globe shrinks every day. If one country declines to create such a beast, other countries still will create their own beast. From what I've seen so far, it's mostly a brute force issue now, not a specialized knowledge issue. Perhaps if all the rumors spilling out of OpenAI about Q* are true, then other countries can be blocked due to lack of the required knowledge, but I have doubts that such secrets would be secret for long.