What will happen is pretty obvious. Those companies will either be classified as too important to fail and get government support or go bankrupt and will be bought for pennies on the dollar. For the customers nothing much will change since tokens are getting cheaper every year and the business is already pretty profitable. Progress will slow down massively till local open weight models catch up to pre-crash SotA and go on from there.
reply> the business is already pretty profitable
replyAs of March 2026, OpenAI generates annual revenue exceeding $12 billion. However, the costs of running ChatGPT are around $17 billion a year.
Source: https://searchlab.nl/en/statistics/chatgpt-statistics-2026
Big improvement I remember when they were spending billions and getting no profit.
replyDo you think that'll take a generation to happen?
replyChatGPT 3.5 came out coming on 4 years ago now. I don't think a human generation (~20-30 years) needs to be the benchmark here, but new juniors in the industry for a handful of years can be said to be a whole "generation". That how I was reading OP.
reply