I think it's highly likely that there will remain one or two companies on the very bleeding edge of AI development for the foreseeable future.

But what I think a lot of people miss is that the market for the truly bleeding edge (developing bio-tech, building the most sophisticated software stacks (probably with a tilt towards simulation, GPU kernel optimization, etc)) is not the whole market.

There's a plethora of use-cases for models that are not on the bleeding edge. If I can solve my relatively simple problems with an off-the-shelf model for a minuscule fraction of the cost of the frontier, I'm going to.

Anecdotal case in point, but writing mostly enterprise CRUD in C#, I've gotten plenty of mileage out of Sonnet, very rarely do I need to use Opus.

Its somewhat of a myth that you need the most advanced, expensive model for software development.