Keep raising 10x more for each round of scaling and very quickly you get large enough to be able to bully anyone into playing with you.
Sama got big enough to be able to twist any arm he wants and soon OpenAI will be too large to fail.
Sure Bank of America could fail and US Government can’t back it but that’s likely massive upheaval in United States.
The whole US economy is getting propped up by AI spending, and to continue on the scaling law ladder each new iteration requires 10x more investment. If OpenAI is not able to raise it's over for anyone adjacent to them (NVIDIA, AMD, Anthropic, etc.).
It's AGI or bust for OpenAI, because as you said there's no margin competing on API tokens since open source is almost as good for most use cases.