Anthropic has existed for a grand total of 4 years.

But yes, there was a window of opportunity when it was possible to do cutting-edge work without billions of investment. That window of opportunity is now past, at least for LLMs. Many new technologies follow a similar pattern.

What about deepseek r1? That was earlier this year - how do you know that there won't be more "deepseek moments" in the coming years?