Plus you're also investing in getting the talent together in the same building. Even if the foundational models aren't the money maker there's still a ton of opportunity having the best experts at building those models working together and figuring out which branches that LLMs spawns can turn into real markets.

It's a high risk investment at this stage but the money is being thrown at the people as much as the current business plan.

No one here is disputing that.

The question is whether whomever builds them can make a profit doing so, or will they just end up being the suckers that everyone who actually makes money piggybacks off. It's really not clear at the moment.

None of which means the money will go to the people making the models.

The game theory logic doesn't care about the labels "OpenAI" or "Anthropic" or any of the others, it's the same if you switch it around arbitrarily, but this is easier to write about if I focus on one of them:

At some point, someone will reproduce GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT, given how much is known about them. When that happens, OpenAI can't make any significant profit from it. GPT-4 might remain sufficiently secret to avoid that, but the history of tech leaks and hacks suggests it too will become public, but even if it does itself remain behind closed doors, there is a further example in that DALL•E 2 is now the boring 3rd horse in the race between Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and the same may happen with the GPT-series of LLMs.

The models leaking or being superseded by others implies profit going to increased productivity in the general economy without investors getting a share.

DALLE2 is boring because pretty much everyone at OpenAI has been busy developing the next GPT model. It was simply not a priority for them. And when GPT4 leaks (or is reproduced) they will most likely have GPT5. In this race it’s far more important to be the closest to AGI than to make money now.