I can understand their (the Meta/Google engineers) frustration when perspectives like yours proliferate everywhere.

Transformers were invented at Google. OpenAI is overwhelmingly a net consumer of AI research, and incredibly closed off on the few innovations they have actually made. There is a graph somewhere for research output of the various research labs that shows that despite OpenAI 300-400 or so employees, their publicly released open access research is a ridiculously tiny fraction of that of other research labs. Consider the damage this might do if their success convinces management at other tech labs to be more closed off with their AI research, further concentrating the ownership of AI into the hands of a single, or select few corporations. In this sense OpenAI is actively harming the democratisation of AI, which given the previously unseen productivity generating effects AI will have seems like a dangerous place to be in.