The real competition is coming out of China right now and I doubt the Chinese government is going to let them buy out their "fast follower" AI companies that are consistently 6-12 months behind in terms of quality. That said, I'm factoring quality as in Opus 4.5/Sonnet 4.5/GPT-5.5 as break points since I haven't really seen an improvement since that point when using AI.
A company consumed half a billion dollars worth of tokens in a month and nobody noticed anything until the bill came due.
Tha $500m dollars is roughly equivalent to 2000 people working for a year or 500 people working for four years, they can and would accomplish a lot if they worked in companies that add value to the economy by solving real problems.
Marketing only takes you so far in creating noise.
Its weird seeing this focus on bench marks again - PC's did this for quite some time. But in the end it came down to - what does all this additional horsepower let you do? Oh create interesting apps, multi-tasking etc. Which was really the value-add.
What? In what way would the change? They are already raising prices..