If you asked any of the CEOs from those companies banning ChatGPT we're in for a glorious AI-shaped future, until it comes to them. It doesn't really inspire any confidence.
Can you imagine if Marlboro or Philip Morris forbade their employees from smoking for health reasons?
A lot of those companies have already set up their own instance of OpenAI's models running on Azure. I'm not involved with this directly, but it is my understanding that Microsoft are selling (and pricing) this aggressively.
Perhaps it is more like Marlboro forcing its employees to smoke Marlboros - if those Marlboros were secret, non-public cigarettes only available on Marlboro premises. OK so maybe this metaphor is a little thin.
I'm fully aware my initial metaphor was a bit forced and it doesn't quite match 1:1 to the original point, but using AIs while at your workplace is the ideal usage they're trying to sell here.
It still gives me a "Do as I say, not as I do" vibe, and reinforces the idea that AI tech is being used merely as a trojan horse to capture and monopolize previously inaccessible markets for the companies building and training the models.
What about all of us plebs who work at small companies not able to self host these models viably? This is the point OP was about. They want us to use their model at our jobs, while they are the first to disallow it at their offices.
I mean ChatGPT is not a creation of Apple so it would be better if you report an example, also a GPU is not that expensive and you can run on it LLM like StarCoder or more general ones like Vicuna for a small team of people with ease.
Can you imagine if Marlboro or Philip Morris forbade their employees from smoking for health reasons?