Alternatively, latecomers will make use of newly cheaply available compute (from the firesales of failing companies) to produce models that match their quality, while having to invest only a fraction of what the first wave had to, allowing them to push the price below the cost floor of the first wave and making them go under.
Yup. The big AI companies are scared to death of LLMs being seen as commodities. But in the long term, they are.
See also: the big deepseek smear campaign.