Agree that people leaving the big two companies is going to be hard to keep a pulse on prior to IPO.

Anthropic and OpenAi are in the news, so they get the press and people go and try out their product. Large enterprise businesses are going to make larger, longer-term contracts with them and are only going to pivot if they think switching costs are easy or if they think the provider won't deliver.

The other inference producers are less well known or you need to get your cloud sales rep to tell you how to switch to them as a provider rather than Anthropic or OpenAI.

I use OpenRouter, I know switching is easy, but larger businesses tend to work in yearly cycles. DeepSeek v4 Flash came out in late April.

I agree OpenAI and Anthropic are going to struggle when the median price of running a smart-enough model keeps falling.

Edit: I also think demand for hardware will be rapidly absorbed by other companies if Anthropic or OpenAI stumble. We've finally turned hardware directly into runnable intelligence and people are not going to go back to the old ways.

It would look like major chaos in the markets.

People tend to conflate the question "is AI a useful technology?" with "are the AI companies going to do well?" but they're surprisingly separated in practice, with either one able to be true while the other is false. There is a lot of money tied up in a lot of hardware with a lot of loans made against that hardware as collateral all based on the assumption that AIs are going to need more and more and more and more hardware and whoever has the hardware wins. If a much better model comes out that requires vastly less hardware, or even more accurately, merely charges vastly less than the current AI companies, then to a first approximation (barring Jevon's paradox, and bearing in mind there's no timeline guarantee on that) all that hardware becomes much less valuable for being grotesquely oversupplied relative to what is necessary, and even though that would generally make AI objectively more useful than it was before, it would cause mass financial chaos in the markets.

The markets need a very particular rate of progress. It isn't entirely clear to me that it's even a possible rate of progress, it may be overconstrained, but they certainly don't have plans for the AI models to get commoditized on the timeframes of these vast, vast array of loans being made against hardware as collateral. Spend a metric shit ton of money to kill all your competition then charge monopoly rent on the one thing absolutely everyone needs doesn't work if you can't economically "kill all your competition" because the economics favor them in the spending spree.

And then, based on the fact that this is not even remotely complicated logic, there are plenty of people who are fully aware that they have a lot of money tied up in not running around telling everyone how wonderful the cheap models have become.

they should be freaking out because every time the chinese labs or non "frontier" labs release a model that is only a few months behind and much cheaper than the openai/anthropic models it shows that they don't deserve their valuations