[wildermuthn]

But since the resources required for training such a model are only available to well-funded entities, it seems like offering the model as an API while releasing the original source-code is the best practical method of getting the model into the hands of people who would otherwise not have access?

[minimaxir]

That depends on which GPT-3 model they're using, and from both the API and the blog page, it's unclear.

Easy access to the 175B model would indeed be valuable, but it's entirely possible they're using a smaller variant for this API.