This is what many folks said about OpenAI when they appeared on the scene building on foundational work done at Google. But the real point here is not to assign arbitrary credit, it’s to ask how those big companies are going to recoup their infinite budgets when all they’re buying is a 6-12 month head start.
This is true, and practically speaking it is how it is. My point was just not to pretend that it’s a fair comparison.