Futurology

It cost so little because all previous open source work was already done, and a lot of the research work had already been knocked out. Building models isn't the time consuming process it used to be, it's the training, testing, retraining loop that's expensive.

If you're just building a model that is focused on specific things-like coding, math, and logic-then you don't need large swathes of content from the internet, you can just train it on already solved, freely available information. If you want to piss away money on an LLM that also knows how many celebrities each celebrity has diddled, well that costs a lot more to make.