Competitors just need to wait for OpenAI to burn all their free money and dig themselves a debt hole they can’t easily climb out of, and then offer a similar experience at a price that barely breaks even or makes a tiny profit, and they win.

> three dimensions they can differentiate on: cost, speed, and quality

The fourth dimension is likely to be the most powerful of the differentiators: specificity.

Think Cursor or Lovable, but tailored for other industries.

There's a weird thing where engineers tend to be highly paid, but people who employ engineers are hesitant to spend highly on tools to make their engineers more productive. Hence all Cursor's magic only gets its base price to ~50% of Intercom's entry-level fee for a tool for people who do customer support.

LLMs applied to high-value industries outside of tech are going to be a big differentiator. And the companies that build such solutions will not have the giant costs associated with building the next foundation model, or potentially operating any models at all.