Running businesses and dealing with customers can be a major pain. There’s a lot of soft work in any business on top of the technical work.
Why bother with all that when you can simply charge an extortionate rate and customers will pay it anyway because it’s still profitable?
Public APIs get distilled, this is why Deepseek and Qwen are so competitive.
I am very confident that frontier models won’t be public at strong AGI levels, and certainly not at superhuman levels.
Because other than SWEs, very few other segments extract significant value from cutting edge AI at present. I suspect that for the average Joe conversing with their chat, GPT-4o was more than adequate (and really, when OpenAI tried to phase that out, the public revolted and they brought it back in).
So companies might pay good money for these models for programming but elsewhere, I don't see where they capture particular interest yet.