I don't see a scenario where it really makes sense to be a frontier lab long term. Eventually model quality will plateau then you distill and get 90% for 10% or less cost.
Opus and GPT are so different there’s room for both and I wouldn’t be ignoring Gemini even if it isn’t ahem great at coding, since it’s quite obviously very good otherwise.
In the times before you also would rather have very smart people working together instead of one very smart dude alone even if he had an identical twin.
Over the past 6 months, Anthropic has made more waves as a product company than a frontier lab.
Plateau on a saturated benchmark where an asymptote to 100% is mathematically baked in?
Or plateau as in it won't solve any Millennium Prize problems within the next decade?
This might come down to when you expect plateau to happen. You could have said similar about transistor density many decades ago.
(I'm not denying it could happen next year for all we know. But we simply don't know, and from what I hear from researchers the breadth of ideas we've tried are still small)
General AI is that scenario. The investor dream is that their horse hits general AI first, patents it (or otherwise somehow stops the competition from hitting it), and then reaps the massive benefits.
I'm not saying it's a likely scenario, but I genuinely believe a big percentage of AI investment revolves around that (or similar) scenarios.