Google has already surpassed them both in all areas except coding. People on HN only look at benchmarks, but Gemini's multimodal understanding, things like identifying what a plant is, normal user use cases (other than chatting), integration with other tools, is much better.

It's believable that Meta, ByteDance, etc. can catch up too. It is not certain that scaling will meaningfully increase performance indefinitely, and if it stops soon, they surely will. Furthermore, other market conditions (US political instability) can enable even more labs, like Mistral, to serve as compelling alternatives.

Uber, TSMC, etc. have strong moats in the form of physical goods and factories. LLMs have nothing even remotely comparable. The main moat is in knowledge, which is easy to transfer between labs. Do you think all the money that goes into training a model goes into the actual final training run? No, it is mostly experiments and failed ideas, which do not have to be repeated by future labs and offshoots.