If you read the Llama2 paper it is very clear that small amounts of data (thousands of records) make vast difference at the instruction turning stage. From the Llama2 paper:
> Quality Is All You Need.
> Third-party SFT data is available from many different sources, but we found that
many of these have insufficient diversity and quality — in particular for aligning LLMs towards dialogue-style
instructions. As a result, we focused first on collecting several thousand examples of high-quality SFT data,
as illustrated in Table 5. By setting aside millions of examples from third-party datasets and using fewer but
higher-quality examples from our own vendor-based annotation efforts, our results notably improved. These
findings are similar in spirit to Zhou et al. (2023), which also finds that a limited set of clean instruction-tuning data can be sufficient to reach a high level of quality. We found that SFT annotations in the order of tens of thousands was enough to achieve a high-quality result. We stopped annotating SFT after collecting a total of
27,540 annotations. Note that we do not include any Meta user data.
It's likely OpenAI has invested in this and has good coverage in a larger range of domains. That alone probably explains a large amount of the gap.