ofc what I'm getting at is, you can't get something from nothing. There is no free lunch.

You spend energy distilling the intelligence of the entire internet into a set of weights, but you still had to expend the energy to have humans create the internet first. And on top of this, in order to pick out what you want from the corpus, you have to put some energy in: first, the energy of inference, but second and far more importantly, the energy of prompting. The model is valuable because the dataset is valuable; the model output is valuable because the prompt is valuable.

So wait then, where does this exponential increase in value come from again?