based on information and background they thoroughly gave when releasing their research its pretty easy to put together that it did take them significantly less resources to train this model. only having specific parameters available at a time instead of activating everything all at once is pretty ingenious.

that and they just happened to be undergoing a large scale "cyber attack"

I'm not sure I see the bear argument for NVidia here. Huge AI models certainly drive NVidia sales, but huge AI models are also widely thought to be untrainable and nearly un-runnable save for large datacenters.

To me, this is ripe for an application of the Jevons paradox. If architectural improvements make similar models cheaper, I would expect to see more of them trained and deployed, not fewer, ultimately increasing the market for GPU-like hardware.