> The important number is your odds of becoming that default provider in the minds of consumers.

I haven't seen any evidence that any Gen AI provider will be able to build a moat that allows for this.

Some are better than others at certain things over certain time periods, but they are all relatively interchangeable for most practical uses and the small differences are becoming less pronounced, not more.

I use LLMs fairly frequently now and I just bounce around between them to stay within their free tiers. Short of some actual large breakthrough I never need to commit to one, and I can take advantage of their own massive spends and wait it out a couple of years until I'm running a local model self-hosted with a cloudflare tunnel if I need to access it on my phone.

And yes, most people won't do that, but there will be a lot of opportunity for cheap providers to offer that as a service with some data center spend, but nowhere near the massive amounts OpenAI, Google, Meta, et al are burning now.