Who can afford to build one

One enormous cost, paid once, and then nothing. That shape has a consequence, and it is not really about money.

Very few organisations train frontier models. Not because the ideas are secret, since most of them are published and this chapter has been citing the papers, but because the entry ticket costs more than most institutions and nearly all universities can raise. The knowledge is public. The means are not.

So the decisions get made in a small number of rooms. Whoever pays for the training run decides what text goes into it, and you saw on an earlier slide how much is settled by that one choice. They decide what the finished model will refuse to do, who is allowed to use it, and what it costs to use.

Everyone else builds on top of what those rooms decided.

None of that is a claim about anyone's intentions. It is a description of where the choices physically happen, and it follows from the cost shape rather than from anybody's plan. The final module comes back to it.