How does this compare to Org-mode? Notable pros/cons?

Most of the data used in training GPT4 has been gathered through open initiatives like Wikipedia and CommonCrawl. Both are freely accessible by anyone. As for building datasets and models, there are many non-profits like LAION and EleutherAI involved that release their models for free for others to iterate on.

While actually running the larger models at a reasonable scale will always require expensive computational resources, you really only need to do the expensive base model training once. So the cost is not nearly as expensive as one might first think.

Any headstart OpenAI may have gotten is quickly diminishing, and it’s not like they actually have any super secret sauce behind the scenes. The situation is nowhere as bleak as you make it sound.

Fighting against the use of publicly accessible data is ultimately as self-sabotaging ludditism as fighting against encryption.