More or less our approach here too. They offered to help with our work at a loss for themselves, why not take them up on it? Not necessarily to hurt the AI labs, but just because we'd be foolish not to take something offered at such a discount.
Makes sense if they are planning to concede in Ukraine. The Russian economy is dependent on continued military buildup, so they will try to continue with that but go back to their cold war-era posturing with the forces and matériel produced.
Does this mean that work created with it can be copyrighted? Since the courts ruled that the inclusion of pilfered IP was the reason other model's work cannot be copyrighted, I would think so!
In that case, this is a completely different beast. It can maybe be used for things that need a durable copyright.
I have always taken an untrusting approach to LLMs for coding, born out of them being absolute trash at first. They're 1000x better now, but I still guide it every step of the way. It limits my speed gains, but I got what I wanted: no more typing out code and looking up patterns to get the exact syntax.
What a lot of use on here are salivating for is the ability to run these on prosumer hardware at home. So we tend to jump to the conclusion that "standard" means "consumer-grade" because that's what we want to see.
Still, very cool work!