I wouldn’t trust anything geohot says. He doesn’t have access to any inside information.
https://twitter.com/soumithchintala/status/16712671501017210... It looks like at least one other person has also heard the same information.
What is weird is how competitive the open-source models are to the closed ones. For instance, PaLM-2 Bison is below multiple 12B models[0], despite it being plausibly much bigger[1]. The gap with GPT-4 is not that big; the best open-source model on the leaderboard beats it 30% of the time.