That's the thing, nothing points to a world with a single winner in AI models. I get what you are saying, but not sure OpenAI can survive the burn unless they build an unmatchable AGI. And that's pure speculation at this point.

I mean, someone needs to rise to the top, unless society as a whole just says "There's no value here." and frankly there's too much real value right now for that. So someone's surviving, at least at the service level. Maybe they just end up building off of open source models, but I can't see how the best brains in the business don't find a way to get paid to make these models. Am I missing something?

There’s definitely a future for LLMs from an enterprise point of view. Even current capability models will be widely used by companies. But it’s seems that will be highly commoditized space, and OpenAI lacks the deep pockets and infrastructure capabilities of Meta and Google to distribute that commodity at the lowest cost.

OpenAI valuation is reliant IMO on them on them 1) AGI possible through NNs, 2) them developing AGI first and 3) it being somewhat hard to replicate. Personally I’d probably stick 10%, 40%, and 10% on those but I’m sure others would have very different opinions or even disagree with my whole premise.

I am not saying that LLMs don't provide value, just that this value might not be captured exclusively by OpenAI in the future. If the idea is that OpenAI will have an unmatched competitive advantage over everyone else in this area, then that has already been proven to be wrong. The rest is speculation about AGI, the genius or Altman, etc.