I feel like Grok/xAI or whatever they're calling it was Exhibit A in "it just takes money", although I'd also add "and the organizational willingness to build not buy".

> give it a couple years every nation on the planet with 20-40B

Was this sarcasm?

How many nations on earth have 20-40B for LLM training? At 40.2 B, Spain has the 15th largest military budget in the world. I doubt any nation will spend 40B on gradient descent.