> I think it's critical that AI be democratized and not isolated in the hands of a few private companies.

While I'd like to agree with this, the fact is that pushing the frontier out has always taken (and folks expect to continue to take) hundreds of millions/billions of dollars. Open source and distilled models can follow on for much cheaper, but it's hard to imagine the frontier ever being "democratized" given the huge sums of money required. It was this realization that forced OpenAI to take tons of private investment in the first place.