Of course the screenwriters are going to find a way to involve Elon in the 2nd season but is the most valuable part the researchers or the models themselves?
My understanding is that the models are not super advanced in terms of lines and complexity of code. Key researches, such as Ilya probably can help a team recreate much of the training and data preparation code relatively quickly. Which means that any company with access to enough compute would be able to catch up with OpenAI's current status relatively quickly, maybe in less than a year.
The top researchers on the other hand, espcially those who have shown an ability to successfully innovate time and time again (like Ilya), are much harder to recreate.
