And yet here we are a few weeks after that with a free to use model that cost millions to develop and is open to everyone.

I think you’re taking an unwarranted entitled view.

Any entity working on something in beta has early access anyone could hypothetically email out in grunt work and get involved in a project and get early access therefore this logic when tested against a third party example such as any engineer this argument isn't valid as any engineer entitled or not could have early access

Asking someone to beta test your product is more like asking them for a favor than the other way around. Finding a sympathetic person to try out your stuff and provide intelligent, relevant feedback in a timely fashion is not that easy.

e: Oh - this is a16z, so yeah probably early access - scratch my additional comments

I agree that I don't like early/insider stuff

That said - I believe Llama 2 is architecturally identical to the previous one and given that they are using 13B it is probably just a drag and drop bin replacement and reload your servers.

We all knew Llama 2 was coming so it might be within the capabilities of a hungry startup with no early access.