I don't consider models a commodity though. Coffee and steel are commodities. You need some level of quality and materials, but they can be swapped out. Models are more like engines or CPUs.

Unbenchmarked things like their ability to use south Jakartan slang, writing jokes, how and when they reject input, how tightly they adhere to system input, how they'd rate a thing from 1-10. They function as a part of a complex system and can't be swapped out. I'm using Claude Sonnet 3.0 for a production app and I need a week to be able to swap it to 3.5 while maintaining the same quality. We've trained our own models and it's still incredibly hard to compete with $0.075 per million tokens just on things like cost of talent, hardware, electricity. And that speed.

The question is why not something like Anthropic?

I'd say OpenAI has other cards up their sleeve. The hardware thing Jony Ive is working on. Sam Altman invests into fusion power and Stripe; guess who's getting a discount? There is a moat, but it lies at a higher level. Other competitors are also playing other kinds of moats like small offline AI.

To be a commodity, there has to be a constrained supply. So-called AI is just software and the replicable nature of software means it cannot be a commodity. I'd agree on your other point that the competitors have done a great job of catching up to a point where the valuation makes little sense given the limited moat.