Does $200k and 9.5 days to train a model sound cheap and fast to you? This is a serious question, and you should also consider the odds that your first shot hits the desired target.
In this video, I begin my promised discussion of open source large language models. If you are an organization that wants to build its own LLM, refining an open source model looks like the right path to me at the moment. However, I see a lot of danger that it could be more expensive than some people think, more poorly performing, and leave you with some of the problems that scared you away from refining a model like OpenAI's celebrated ChatGPT. If nothing else, you will have a lot of decisions to make and giving you context for those decisions is what I hope to do here.