They are both on borrowed time. The only thing keeping them afloat business wise is that current hardware costs are prohibitive which keeps local models artificially constrained. The next era will be open weight / local model for the masses and SOTA for the big players.
If your prognosis is true I'm not sure it's fully positive. Inference without batching is just massive less efficient, even if local hardware can be more energy efficient per operation and can skip out on cooling.
Open weights, obviously beneficial. Local compute when not necessary, seems like it'd be significantly worse for the environment?
I think because more devs cant run things locally, we are not getting the "open source gains" that you would get by having the network effect of more eyes on the work. Theres still little nuggets of gold in there though (eg antirez's DS4 project). But once more people can get their hands on hardware, I think the flood gates will open. And once that happens, I dont necessarily think people will run locally. But that will enable fungible service providers which we already see, but at a much larger scale.
To a lesser degree, open weights also leads to an eventuality of these two companies not being able to sustain their capital investments. Not to mention their pricing models are unsustainable as they currently stand. So they are being eroded from the outside-in, while also trying to fight the internal pressure to continue to raise prices/margins.
EDIT: I actually think the harness is more of a future for these big players. And theres real value in providing a high quality harness. So maybe they move to SAAS for claude code in the future. Who knows
