The price tag on this stuff, in human capital, data, and hardware, is high enough to preclude that sort of “perfect competition” environment.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I feel like we right now live in that perfect competition environment though. Inference is mostly commoditized, and it’s a race to the bottom for price and latency. I don’t think any of the big providers are making super-normal profit, and are probably discounting inference for access to data/users.
Why would anyone think that, and why do you think everyone thinks that?
And this pattern has repeated itself reliably since the industrial revolution.
Successful ASI would essentially end this process, because after ASI there's nowhere else for humans to go (in tech at least.)