I honestly don't think that matters for multiple reasons:

1. There are already multiple "sota" models on the market that compete with only marginal gains between them (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/Gemini) and some that are catching up (DeepSeek, Qwen,..).

2. The fact that something is a hard engineering problem does not mean it's generating revenue. So while what you said is true, deep expertise is required to push the industry forward, I don't think that is going to matter for the bottom line of these companies. Hence why I think the models don't give a company any 'moat' in a capitalist economy.