Every business building on LLMs should also have a contingency plan for if they needed to go to an all open-weights model strategy. OpenAI / Anthropic / Google have nothing stopping them from 100x-ing the price or limiting access or dropping old models or outright competing with their customers. Building your whole business on top of them will prove to be as foolish as all of the media companies that built on top of Facebook and got crushed later.
Couldn't you also make this argument about cloud infrastructure from the standard hyperscaler cloud providers (AWS, GCP, ...)? For that matter, couldn't you make this argument about dependency your business has which it purchases from other businesses which are competing against each other to provide it?
In general, you are right, but AI as a field is pretty volatile still. Token producers are still pivoting and are generally losing money. They will have to change their strategy sooner or later, and there is a good chance that the users will not be happy about it.
Are the cloud computing providers burning tens of millions of dollars each day and having to resort to NBA-player level salaries to recruit talent?
AWS/GCP are at least making money with their current pricing model.
When your provider is dumping at a loss, it's their way of saying that the business plan is to maximize lock-in/monopoly effects followed by the infamous "enshittification".
I mean in most large businesses the companies are performing risk analysis for exactly this.
OpenAI / Anthropic / Google have nothing stopping them from 100x-ing the price
There is also nothing stopping this silly world from breaking out into a dispute where chips are embargoed. Then we'll have high API prices and hardware prices (if there's any hardware at all). Even for the individual it's worth having that 2-3k AI machine around, perhaps two.
> OpenAI / Anthropic / Google have nothing stopping them from 100x-ing the price
presumably... capitalism still exists?