And even that would be rich as a accusation from SOTAs that depend on explicitly disregarding millions of training data intellectual property..

LLMs are themselves copy cats.

I say thanks for open sourcing and thereby promoting affordable innovation, instead of "nefarious". :)

Yes, variants typically 2-3x less good...

Same with speculative decoding... They all do something, but there are known techniques that are substantially better - that just were't known when they started development of the previous models.