It was a credible argument when GPT-3 was released. But now there are open models that are as capable as GPT-3 and that mayhem has not materialized, with the possible exception of GPT-4chan. They could release it now under a non-commercial license, if they cared to.
My experience with GPT-3 is that while it does perform better than those mini-GPT small models, the gap does not compensate for the fact that the small models are free/unrestricted and you can use them as much as you like.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread there are some large models around the 50-200B band that compete directly with GPT-3, but I haven’t used these.
