There are three possible paths that sort of substantiate current valuations:

1) Business: LLMs become essential to every company, and you become rich by selling the best enterprise tools to everyone.

2) Consumer: LLMs cannibalize search and a good chunk of the internet, so people end up interacting with your AI assistant instead of opening any websites. You start serving ads and take Google's lunch.

3) Superhuman AGI: you beat everyone else to the punch to build a life form superior to humans, this doesn't end up in a disaster, and you then steal underpants, ???, profit.

Anthropic is clearly betting on #1. Google decided to beat everyone else to #2, and they can probably do it better and more cheaply than others because of their existing infra and the way they're plugged into people's digital lives. And OpenAI... I guess banked on #3 and this is perhaps looking less certain now?