Most of the training cost is not in the final training run, it's in all of the R&D (including salaries, equity, etc.) that it takes to get to the final training run. The actual cost of all of the TPUs (or GPUs), power, networking, storage, etc. for the final training run is significant, but it's even more expensive to have this huge R&D team doing frontier model development and using a lot of those same resources during development.
I think you're right that releasing models at a slower cadence would bring down costs to some degree, but it's not clear how much. All of these companies could significantly reduce their opex but at the risk of falling behind in terms of being at the frontier.
I think you're right that releasing models at a slower cadence would bring down costs to some degree, but it's not clear how much. All of these companies could significantly reduce their opex but at the risk of falling behind in terms of being at the frontier.