Looking back, the cost of earlier AI models was much lower. ChatGPT-3 cost only around $2 million to $4 million make in 2020, while Gemini's precursor PaLM in 2022 took between $3 million and $12 million to train when only looking at the cost of computing.
Even at these price points, keeping up with cutting-edge AI development might have proved difficult for academic or other public institutions that have traditionally been active in AI research.