We are currently living in blessed times like the dotcom boom in 1999 where they are handing out free cars if you agree to have a sticker on the side. This tech is being wildly subsidized to try and capture customers, but for average Joe there is no difference from one product to the next, except branding.
You can easily get x10 optimizations with some obvious changes.
You can run a small 100 person enterprise on a single 24 gb GPU right now. (And this is before economies of scale have started optimizing hardware.)
OpenAI needs the keep the illusion of an anthropomorphic AGI chatbot going to keep the invenstments flowing. This is expensive and stupid.
If you just want to solve the actual typical business problems ("check this picture for offensive content" and similar stuff) you don't need all that smoke and mirrors.
The AI hardware requirements are currently insane; the models are doing with Megawatts of power and warehouses full of hardware what an average Joe does in 20 Watts and a 'bowl of noodles'.
