Maybe it's cynical to think that way but maybe it's a way to crush the competition before it even begins: I would probably not invest in researching LLMs now, knowing that there is a company that will very likely produce a model close enough for free and I will likely never make back the investment.
I don't think it's necessarily the small competitors that they are worried about, but they could be trying to prevent OpenAI from becoming too powerful and competing with them.
