Not convinced tbh. Smaller, more targeted companies (Cursor being the most obvious) are beating frontier labs at building products targeting specific use cases, so it seems that selling general-purpose API inference will be critical for the frontier labs
Think the primary lesson from grok and deepseek is that there is no moat and there won’t actually be any big money in general purpose frontier models. Just as there was no big money in being an ISP.
For me Grok and DeepSeek show that though many labs can produce a model at 80% of frontier quality, we have still never seen anyone (arguably Anthropic briefly) catch OpenAI / DeepMind, and power/commercial users are willing to pay a premium to have the best model over a model just nearly as good
Very soon 80% of frontier quality will be indistinguishably good for lots of routine tasks.
As a medium-large company I think it would be a poor strategy to vendor lock yourself in with a model provider which will never offer top tier capabilities just because it can still do some of the routine tasks. Competitors will surely accept higher costs in order to automate more complex tasks