"There's not going to be much competition to drive prices down, the barriers to entry are already huge. There'll likely to be one clear winner, becoming a near-monopoly, or maybe we'll get a duopoly at best."

Based on what exactly? So far every time OpenAI, Anthropic or whatever has released a new top performing model, competitors have caught up quickly. Open source models have greatly improved as well.

I expect AI to be just like cloud computing in general - AWS, Azure, GCP being the main providers, with dozens of smaller competitors offering similar services as well.