[bryanlarsen]

That's one of 3 possible futures.

1. 1-3 LLM vendors are substantially higher quality than other vendors and none of those are open source. This is an oligarchy and the scenario you described will play out.

2. >3 LLM vendors are all high quality and suitable for the tasks. At least one of these is open source. This is the "commodity" scenario, and we'll end up paying roughly the cost of inference. This still might be hundreds per month, though.

3. Somewhere in between. We've got >3 vendors, but 1-3 of them are somewhat better than the others, so the leaders can charge more. But not as much more than they can in scenario #1.

[CuriouslyC]

It's clear what's gonna play out. Chinese open source labs are slowly closing the gap, and as American frontier labs hit diminishing return on various tasks, the Chinese models are going to be good enough for the vast majority of use cases. This is going to strip American labs ability to do monopoly plays, and force them into open behavior.

The only place frontier labs will be able to profit take is niche models for specific purposes where they can control who has access to traces tightly. Any general pupose LLM with highly available traces is gonna get distilled down instantly.