Even if you have cheaper models if you have tons of compute power you can do more things than if you had less compute power!

You can experiment with huge societies of agents, each exploring multitude of options. You can run world models where agents can run though experiments and you can feed all this back to a single "spokesperson" and you'll have an increase in intelligence or at the very least you'll able to distill the next generation models with that and rinse and repeat.

I mean I welcome the democratizing effect of this but I fail to understand how this is something that is so readily accepted as a doom scenario for people owning or building massive compute.

If anything, what we're witnessing is the recognition that useful stuff can be achieved by multiplying matrices!