I'd agree with you, except I've heard this argument before. Amazon, Google, Facebook all burned lots of cash, and folks were convinced they would fail.
On the other hand plenty burned cash and did fail. So could go either way.
I expect, once the market consolidates to 2 big engines, they'll make bonkers money. There will be winners and losers. But I can't tell you which is which yet.
Unless you compare with the reported cash burn or projected losses.
> they’ll raise effective prices some more while Claude diffuses into the economy, sounds like a money printer
But the problem is, they have no moat. Even if Claude diffuses into the economy (still to be seen how much it can effectively penetrate sectors other than engineering, spam, marketing/communications), there is no moat, all providers are interchangeable. If Antrhopic raise the prices too much, switch out to the OpenAI equivalent products.
I disagree very strongly with this, both anecdotally and in the data - subscriptions are growing in all frontier providers; anecdata is right here in HN when you look around almost everyone is talking about CC, codex is a distant second, and completely anecdotally I personally strictly prefer GPT 5.3+ models for backend work and Opus for frontend; Gemini reviews everything that touches concurrency or SQL and finds issues the other models miss.
My general opinion is that models cannot be replaceable, because a model which can replace every other provider must excel at everything all specialist models excel at and that is impossible to serve at scale economically. IOW everyone will have at least two subscriptions to different frontier labs and more likely three.
If tomorrow Kimi release a model better at something, you'd switch to it.
I postulate in practice this won't matter since the space of use cases is so large if Kimi released the absolutely best model at everything they wouldn't be able to serve it (c.f. Mythos).