In these fast moving early times of LLMs, they can maintain this advantage with simple things like proprietary datasets and greater compute.
The difference in quality between the best model that can be made with such proprietary utilities and without is likely to decrease over time as open datasets of greater quality are published and the field matures.
The difference in quality and number of competitors ultimately pays the bills and the harsher the competition is, the less money there will be, for each individual company, to maintain their possibly dwindling proprietary edge.
The greater access to compute is an edge companies will likely hold for a while. It will be interesting to see how much open models will be able to catch up and how great of an edge proprietary models will maintain.
The difference in quality between the best model that can be made with such proprietary utilities and without is likely to decrease over time as open datasets of greater quality are published and the field matures.
The difference in quality and number of competitors ultimately pays the bills and the harsher the competition is, the less money there will be, for each individual company, to maintain their possibly dwindling proprietary edge.
The greater access to compute is an edge companies will likely hold for a while. It will be interesting to see how much open models will be able to catch up and how great of an edge proprietary models will maintain.