It feels like ChatGPT won the time to market war already.
I'll switch again soon as something better is out.
You may be right with the average person on the street, but I wonder how many have lost interest in LLM usage and cancelled their GPT plus sub.
This is similar to the early days of the search engine wars, the browser wars, and other categories where a user can easily adopt, switch between and use multiple. It's not like the cellphone OS/hardware war, PC war and database war where (most) users can only adopt one platform at a time and/or there's a heavy platform investment.
ChatGPT is nowhere close to perfection, and we are still in the early days with plenty of competition. None of the LLMs are that good yet.
Many users here are using both Claude and ChatGPT because it's just another fucking tab in the browser. Try it out.
I think you're just seeing the "make it work" stage of the combo "first make it work, then make it fast".
Time to market is critical, as you can attest by the fact you framed the situation as "on par with GPT-4o and Claude Opus". You're seeing huge investments because being the first to get a working model stands to benefit greatly. You can only assess models that exist, and for that you need to train them at a huge computational cost.