On the token limits etc - one assumes that OpenAI et al are able to “hire expert in field, and let them spend the equivalent of a million dollars of tokens” because they are not actually selling their complete compute 24 hrs a day, so the cost internally is a negligible (ish) electricity bill.

Which is very suggestive - if after everything they are not fully loaded then the next gazillion data centres being built look unlikely to be needed.

For OpenAI, research is marketing. I’m sure they’ve got plenty of budget for that.

RL training can use all of them - idk what needed means.

Presumably it's a rounding error compared to their full output, and they're making sure they have enough compute set aside for research by limiting public models. The more datacenters they build the less they have to limit them.