Having to pay has nothing to do with a good being a commodity. I have to pay for sugar, but there is no big difference between brands that justify any of them commanding a monopoly rent, so, sugar is a commodity. The same is more or less true of LLMs right now and unless someone comes up with a new paradigm beyond the transformers architecture, there is no reason to believe this commodification trend is going to be reversed.

Most of the differentiation is happening on the application/agent layer. Like Coworker.

The rest of it, is happening on post-training. Incremental changes.

We are not talking about EUV lithography here. There are no substantial moths of years of pure and applied research protected by patents.