No API, no code, no model to test, we are to believe the verbiage that the paper contains at its face value?
The arxiv paper is written for researchers who are building these models. We benefited tremendously from reading papers on GPT-3, PaLM, Chinchilla, Galactica, Gopher, Bloom, OPT, most of which are closed models. We are contributing back to that community, and the collective experience of people who are training these models. We learned a lot that will help others who are making their own decisions about how to train models.
If you are looking for an API to use, this isn't for you.
Publishing models is definitely better than only a paper, but I think you're being unnecessarily harsh in that case.
We would all prefer it if OpenAI released a proper paper about GPT4, for instance, even if they did not release the complete model alongside it.