The tools are going to ~zero (~ 5 years). The open source LLM's are here. No one can put them back or take them down. No internet, no problem. I don't see a long term future in frontier llm companies.
What I don't get is, how are these free LLMs getting funded? Who is paying $20-100 million to create an open weights LLM? Long term why would they keep doing it?
I see what you're saying, but it doesn't matter that much in the long run. If everything stopped right now, the state-of-the-art open source models can still solve a lot of problems. They may never solve coding, per se, but they're good enough.