Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "they can just come eat your lunch once it looks yummy enough. Tread carefully" True, and worse, they're hungry because it's increasingly seeming like "hosting LLMs and charging by the token" is not terribly profitable. I don't really see a path for the major players that isn't "Sherlock everything that achieves traction".
But what’s the future in terms of profitability of LLM providers? As long as features like Study Mode are little more than creative prompting, any provider will eventually be able to offer them and offer token-based charging.
We can assume that OpenAI/Anthropic offerings are going to be better long term simply because they have more human capital, though, right? If it turns out that what really matters in the AI race is study mode, then OpenAI goes "ok let's pivot the hundreds of genius level, well-paid engineers to that issue. AND our engineers can use every tool we offer for free without limits, even experimental models". It's tough for the small AI startup to compete with that, the best hope is to be bought like Windsurf