Certainly there's still a business there, I'm not saying they won't exist. But it's not going to be a monopoly-esque business with so many players in the ring, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Deepseek, Alibaba, GLM, Kimi etc. It will be cutthroat and a race to the bottom on price. And the difference from today -> 6 months ago intelligence will not be very meaningful.

Investors are largely treating these as future monopolies though.

We can already do so much with existing models. Harness improvements are probably more meaningful at this point.

e.g. say most image recognition can get saturated by a model of size xB parameters, so your tool for that can handoff to a smaller model. Document text extraction can use a model of size yB parameters. A model of size zB for summarizing text.

We are starting to get to a point where you can reasonably scope out an upper bound of required size/effort for many common tasks, and if you string these together, the frontier will largely act as an intelligent invoker of more efficient models.

Up until now there have been meaningful gains to each of those types of workstreams by using newer models, but that is starting to no longer be the case.

Yes, I do believe token consumption will rise exponentially from here in the near term. But cost of switching is low, and substantial profitability will be difficult.