The company was supposed to be funded by Elon who pledged a billion. Then he bailed when his coup failed. Sam Altman had to find a sponsor, or have the company go bankrupt in a matter of weeks.
What's hard to comprehend here?
As for the models topping your Hugging Face chart, they're literally all funded (by the billion) by private enterprises and the US govt. It's baffling to me how this is supposed to be an argument in your favor. Even the "not by an unattainable margin" comment makes no sense, unless you think getting from 40% to 60% is as easy as getting from 60% to 80%, and then getting from 80% to 100%. Which you clearly seem to think.
Anthropic's models are closed and funded by the money of Sam Bankman-Fried, of all people, and more recently Amazon. They're trying to raise billions more from Google and others. That's your idea of being open and not needing corporate investment for some reason? LOL, oh my god.
The "free" model you're citing is MADE BY META, a company worth almost a trillion dollars, and which has the largest social media presence in the world, from which to mine data.
You have absolutely not even the faintest idea what you're talking about.