Reproducibility is a key element of the scientific process
How is anyone else going to reproduce the experiment if it's going to cost them $10 million because they don't work at Google and would have to rent the infrastructure?
How is anyone else going to reproduce the experiment if it's going to cost them $10 million because they don't work at Google and would have to rent the infrastructure?
That being said, yes, this is hard to reproduce for your average Joe, but there are also a lot of companies (like OpenAI, Facebook, ...) that are able to throw this amount of hardware at the problem. And in a few years you'll probably be able to do it on commodity hardware.
It works and helps to get a salary raise or a better job, so they continue.
A bit like when someone goes to a job interview, didn't do anything, and claims "My work is under NDA".