Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely the solution here is "put the model on BitTorrent, you cowards". Like, okay, the model's big and unwieldy to run. But hardware's always getting better, and there are lots of research use-cases where it's okay if it takes ten minutes to page the model in and out of SSD while generating predictions. Plus, maybe we'd get some more discoveries in the field of efficiently running huge models. The arguments about "s…
The author though raises concerns about both the availability (openness) of the model as well as the current ability to run it due to cost (equity / equality of access). Making the model available would still not make it equal access. I’m not saying I agree or disagree with the openness argument, but the equality argument is separate.
The amount of cheap GPU access floating out there is nuts. You can spin up a GPU instance to do best-in-class ML stuff using Fast.Ai on services like Paperspace or Colab, right now, for free.