The $5M number is Chinese propaganda, designed to slow investment in American AI startups, service their own shorts against American titans like Nvidia, and hide sanction evasion.
America is a fertile bed for psyops like this because our media apparatus hates our technology companies and wants to see President Trump fail.
Refusing to talk about Tank Man
What happens when you ask it to criticize Xi
Between Altmans and Chineese, Altmans always have orders of magnitude larger probability to be liars.
There is purely technical reasons why Cineese LLMs will always be much cheaper and more relevant than Western one. Chineese have much less things to censor (and so much less constraints to apply to LLM) than the West.