> From some estimates I've seen, the compute cost alone would be around $10m, +/-

At market prices. All the estimates I've seen are based on OpenAI API costs. It doesn't mean that's what they paid, or how they paid for it.

But yes, the surprising willingness of humans to solve hard problems in exchange for food and board is underrated.

Given that they all the bit AI players are still loosing money, it follows that their total costs are _higher_ that their API pricing would imply.