What if the competitors are also expensive? If one of OpenAI and Anthropic raises prices, the other one will follow suit (since both have the same profitability problem).
Open source models currently look good on paper, but the flagship models are still quite huge and cannot be run efficiently on consumer hardware, thus having the same inference hosting cost issues (I'm assuming OpenAI and Anthropic has done a shit ton of optimizations already on their servers.) The main breakthrough needed is plainly cheaper and more efficient hardware (such as TPUs or Huawei Ascends), and how to scale infrastructure quickly without losing money.
Open source models currently look good on paper, but the flagship models are still quite huge and cannot be run efficiently on consumer hardware, thus having the same inference hosting cost issues (I'm assuming OpenAI and Anthropic has done a shit ton of optimizations already on their servers.) The main breakthrough needed is plainly cheaper and more efficient hardware (such as TPUs or Huawei Ascends), and how to scale infrastructure quickly without losing money.