Is making an assumption that hardware is not also facing restrictions.
> code and data is practically available
Disagree; although the base model data is, the RLHF data isn't.
This is also why 3rd parties are not able to replicate Google, despite all the PageRank patents having expired and the web being about as crawlable for Google as for, say, Bing.
> "median CS grad-student"
… is how I regard the quality of ChatGPT's code output, FWIW.
There are open sources of RLHF data - for example, the LMSys Chatbot Arena dataset (for same prompt two different responses along with which the human preferred), ShareGPT
It also isn’t hard to use existing leading AIs like GPT-4 or Claude-3 to generate synthetic RLHF datasets. They’ll put words in their terms of service to say you can’t use a dataset generated in that way to a train a competing model, but their ability to enforce those terms in practice is very open to question