I agree with your premise: I have used 65b variants and of course they’re not as good as OpenAI. GPT3 has 175b parameters, and OpenAI has done more RLHF than anyone else. Why would we expect to get comparable performance with models a fraction of the size and a pittance of the fine tuning?

That said, it’s clear that replicating GPT4+ performance is within the resources of a number of large tech orgs.

And the smaller models can definitely still be useful for tasks.