>copies of SOTA models that only take 20% of the resources
They might be 20% of the price (because they don't have to invest that much in training), but are probably not 20% of the resources (ie. inference), considering they take more tokens to do the same task, and have slower inference speeds.
Even at 2x the tokens (max from that tweet), that makes them 40% of resources. Which is still only 40% of the resources.