Worse, I was talking to a friend yesterday, their AI-powered technology provider just uses Claude for everything and now they sell themselves as super smart. They're just vibe coders but the general public does not know the difference until the contracts are signed.

Depends on what you research: if you're looking to train a fully fledged model to replace OpenAI's stuff, sure. But what if you're doing research around peripherals? E.g. #1017613 could potentially be researched on top of an existing open distilled model - something you could in theory run on a modern 4M sats mini pc as long as it has a proper GPU.