Disagree. It took more than 12 months from the release of GPT-4 to someone else producing a model of equivalent quality, and that definitely wasn't due to a shortage of investment from the competition.
There's a huge amount of depth in training a really good LLM. Not helped by the fact that iteration is incredibly expensive - it might take several months (and millions of dollars) before you can tell if your new model is working well or if there was some mistake in the pipeline that lead to a poor quality result.
Almost all of the world-class LLMs outside of OpenAI/DeepMind have been trained by people who previously worked at those organizations - giving them invaluable experience such that they could avoid the most expensive mistakes while training their new models.
