The issue is that most tasks do not require frontier-level intelligence, but companies like OAI can really only profit off of the frontier. Capabilities from a year or two ago are so outdated that even OpenAI gives it away for free and there are many other models biting at their heels. In other words they are spending huge amounts of money to cash in on a depreciating asset.
So one possible future is that frontier-level training becomes so expensive and the use cases so sparse that it simply isn’t viable to keep going bigger.
Once the land grab is over, the market will consolidate and the winners will absorb the losers. Then the few winners will be the only ones with real capital to train frontier models and will have true pricing power.
Similar to how social media companies or the gig-economy benefits from network effects, AI companies will benefit from having the lion's share of paying customers (that also constantly feed in more data to train the models on).
So one possible future is that frontier-level training becomes so expensive and the use cases so sparse that it simply isn’t viable to keep going bigger.