> The top couple LLMs are extraordinarily expensive - will get dramatically more expensive yet - and are one of the most challenging products that have been created in all of human history.

I disagree. The more we learn about LLMs the more it appears that they're not as difficult to build as it initially seemed.

You need a lot of GPUs and electricity, so you need money, but the core ideas: dump in a ton of pre-training data, then run layers of instruction tuning on top - are straight-forward enough that there are already 4-5 organizations that are capable of training GPT-4 class LLMs - and it's still a pretty young field.

Compared to human endeavors like the Apollo project LLMs are pretty small fry.