The public of the US, China, Japan, the UK, and Canada at the very least contributed to every precursor to transformers in the history of AI. Public and private universities, government grants to them, government projects, prizes to government contests, direct government investment into and subsidies for companies doing commercial research, tax breaks to operators designed to encourage the growth of the field, and large government contracts to use things the government might not even have good uses for yet all add up to government assisted funding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...

The public “funded” these models in the sense of contributing to their training data.

The foundations of it, yes: "all of these were publicly or quasi-publicly funded"