Instead, they currently own the entire Pareto frontier — they have the lowest cost model (in terms of inference and training) at every commercially-available level of output quality.

We saw the same attitude from Silicon Graphics, Sun, etc vs Linux and Windows during the 1990s. It led to those companies’ ruin.

Concretely, I remember lots of arguments that the Linux kernel team would stall out once they implemented posix, since that was the end of the “copy for the sake of compatibility” runway.

While making such claims, none of the Unix vendors produced anything vaguely price-competitive with whitebox PCs (they were slightly better for niche workloads at 10x the cost, with crippling guardrails, er, license gated features).

Those vendors even tried getting the US government to intervene with procurement regulations, etc.

Anyone that was paying attention during the dotcom era should know how the current bubble ends.