There are many things that are capital intensive, and we don't hold their product to be particularly special (cars, drugs)

That being said, it's true that we consider information to be a special case.

But what you say is a problem for the "deep research" use of chatbots, or the "AI summaries" of search engines.

But the same could well be said about search engines themselves. That still didn't get the level of hysteria that LLMs get. AI summaries on search should go away though, they destroy the viability of the websites they source information from.

I would like a truly open (incl. open training) model, that could be produced through public funding by a large collaboration of academics and private parties.

I also believe that once we give up on this "machine god" nonsense, there is a lot to be gained in highly optimized, sector specific, lightweight models, which will be less capital intensive to produce. If I need help writing python code, I don't a model that can translate Japanese into Hungarian.