The only way you get the capital to train and host models at this scale is if you have a story to sell to investors that ends with "and then we become an economic chokepoint and extract rents from everyone else".

I agree that this dream of huge returns is luring investors.

I don't think that it will actually work that way. The barriers to making a useful model appear to be modest and keep getting lower. There are a lot of tasks where some AI is useful, but you don't need the very best model if there's a "good enough" solution available at lower prices.

I believe that the irrational exuberance of AI investors is effectively subsidizing technological R&D in this area before AI company valuations drop to realistic levels. Even if OpenAI ends up being analogous to Yahoo! (a currently non-sexy company that was once a darling of investors), their former researchers and engineers can circulate whatever they learned on the job to the organizations that they join later.