Well, one big difference now is that you need to billions to become the next big player. The barriers to entry are incredibly high, if you plan on competing against the big players.

Of course, there could be some future lab or startup which completely revolutionizes the field by going for some approach that doesn't require a boatload of money to train a model, but for now, we're stuck with the LLMs and the costs they come with..

People say deepseek is about 5 months behind frontier, they claim their final training run was 7 figures. The trail blazing is likely making it cheaper to follow not more expensive.