Massive upfront costs and second place is just first loser. It’s like building fabs but your product is infinitely copyable. Seems pretty rough.
For me, I think that, the possible winners will be close to fully funded up front and the losers will be trying to turn debt into profit and fail.
The rest of us self hoster types are hoping for a massive glut of GPUs and RAM to be dumped in a global fire sale. We are patient and have all those free offerings to play with for now to keep us going and even the subs are so far somewhat reasonable but we will flee in droves as soon as you try to ratchet up the price.
It's a bit unfortunate but we are waiting for a lot of large meme companies to die. Soz!
They don't, the only thing that can justify it is if they get themselves into every business workflow. That's what the investors are counting on.