I specifically think many of the hyperscalers are a bad choice to platform on because they have their own models. You cannot build a viable platform business while directly competing with your potential customers and partners, the incentives are too out-of-whack.

Stripe/CF/Vercel are presumably not going to do foundational model development, so safe there. They are already platform plays to begin with, this strengthens that position.

I can bet AWS won't be doing any serious foundational model development, I knew folks on their AGI team now it's not even big enough to compete with the chinese labs... :3

Azure I am not sure how long they will be around doing MAI thinking models, I feel like they will pivot to smaller simpler enterprise only models. And given they already own npm and github openrouter might have made sense though I think they might buy huggingface, not that I want them to but it just feels like it.

Google IDK what google is doing exactly all my friends I knew in the AI teams are out a while ago, so maybe they are doing something really great we just don't know yet.

But I feel like it makes sense for hyperscalers since they can push their weight around a lot better than openrouter and can offer extra compute when providers are under crunch at higher prices to handle spikes. I think they are the only ones who can truly do fluid compute for GPU/AI in the short term(next couple of years).

Maybe after than we might have other big players in the space. Given the sheer scale of buildout I can almost guarantee we will see this pivot, otherwise there is too much hardware and token prices are too high.