Comment by empath75
> How will the Google/Anthropic/OpenAI's of the world make money on AI if open models are competitive with their models?
So a couple of things. There are going to be a handful of companies in the world with the infrastructure footprint and engineering org capable of running LLMs efficiently and at scale. You are never going to be able to run open models in your own infra in a way that is cost competitive with using their API.
Competition _between_ the largest AI companies _will_ drive API prices to essentially 0 profit margin, but none of those companies will care because they aren't primarily going to make money by selling the LLM API -- your usage of their API just subsidizes their infrastructure costs, and they'll use that infra to build products like chat gpt and claude, etc. Those products are their moat and will be where 90% of their profit comes from.
I am not sure why everyone is so obsessed with "moats" anyway. Why does gmail have so many users? Anybody can build an email app. For the same reason that people stick with gmail, people are going to stick with chatgpt. It's being integrated into every aspect of their lives. The switching costs for people are going to be immense.