A few problems for Anthropic or OpenAI:

1. Model Build/Training costs are escalating if anything

2. They are in an arms race with competitors and can't afford to stop building new models - if they lose the perception of leading, they lose lots of customers overnight.

3. Inference margin is under attack from more specialised models and open weights models.*

4. They have no moat given how simple the interface to the products is - a bunch of text files and text prompts, and little prospect of building a moat.

So those all run counter the possibility of coasting on previous research. To me the most promising avenue for making money for these companies is to replace Google, not AGI or taking over the world's knowledge work. That would mean they are overvalued. Even coasting on previous research, how long would it take to pay off the money they have spent?

* https://strandsagents.com/blog/amazon-saves-millions-replaci...