There are some base models available to the public today. Not on "end of 2025 frontier run" scale, but a few of them are definitely larger and better than GPT-3. There are some uses for things like that.
Not that the limits of GPT-3 were well understood at the time.
We really had no good grasp of how dangerous or safe something like that would - and whether there are some subtle tipping point that could propel something like GPT-3 all the way to AGI and beyond.
Knowing what we know now? Yeah, they could have released GPT-3 base model and nothing bad would have happened. But they didn't know that back then.
