Companies that only produce LLMs will downsize or merge once the progress plateau, but major companies with LLM division can afford to keep spending if the bean counters figure out it do increase their market share.
Let's say the big companies can sustain the losses for now, surely at some point they still need to justify the massive losses. If progress plateaus while the infrastructure compute costs just keeps going up. Wouldn't that technically eventually even force the biggest players in the game to reconsider?