Progress is slowing, in an important way.

Have a muck about with what Qwen 3.6 or Gemma 4 can do and you'll see. I mean this as an illustration but Qwen just isn't as far behind as I expected, and compared to the data centre hardware it will run on a potato.

The frontier models are losing their undeniable edge over that which is unmetered.

And even putting aside my optimism for the smaller open weights models, there's a huge amount of scope for the larger, hosted open weights models that are only just behind the cutting edge and which cost, what, 1/25th of the price on opencode go, openrouter etc.

Commodification is coming, and with it slimmer profit margins; it's hard to see them making anywhere near the kind of money they need to in a commodified market.