Is there a large barrier to entry? I thought that the costs of training, while large, were only a few million so not insurmountable, and the technology is pretty well understood. If this is true it's hard to understand what they'd need $300 million for, and also if there's no moat why they would command a "billions" valuation.
Yes. OpenAI has raised $1bn (plus $10bn from MSFT to exchange GPT access for Azure services) and has been going 8 years. There are some huge challenges to making it work well and fast. You need money for opex (hiring GPUs to train models on mostly) and talent (people to improve the tech). No one is competing with OpenAI without a good chunk of cash in the bank.
Do we know how much it cost to train GPT-4? (Or would cost, if done by someone not trained in Azure by someone partnered with Microsoft?) My impression, without looking into it now, is training GPT-3 was on the order of $1-10 million. GPT-4 would be higher than that, but you're right still in the ballpark of what lots of ordinary companies could pay.
