Yeah, it is insane how many people think that tuning models is nearly impossible, or that it requires a multibillion dollar data center.
It is one of the weirdest variations of people buying into too much hype.
The incumbent are trying to fully control the market but they don't have a justification for that. A company like Google which already had a monopoly over search needs to convince the market that this will allow them to expand past search. If the narrative is that anyone can run a specialized model on their machines for different tasks, this doesn't justify AI companies selling themselves on the assumption of a total market monopoly and stranglehold over the economy.
They cannot sell themselves without concealing reality. This is not a new thing. There were a lot of suppressed projects in Blockchain industry where everyone denied the existence of certain projects and most people never heard about them and talk as if the best coin in existence can do a measly 4 transactions per second as if it's state of the art... Solutions like "Lightning network" don't actually work but they are pitched as revolutionary... I bet there are more people shilling Bitcoin's Lightning network than they are people actually using it. This is the power of centralized financial incentives. Everyone ends up operating on top of shared deception "the official truth" which may not be true at all.