I don't see a scenario where it really makes sense to be a frontier lab long term. Eventually model quality will plateau then you distill and get 90% for 10% or less cost.
I'm not saying it's a likely scenario, but I genuinely believe a big percentage of AI investment revolves around that (or similar) scenarios.
In the times before you also would rather have very smart people working together instead of one very smart dude alone even if he had an identical twin.
(I'm not denying it could happen next year for all we know. But we simply don't know, and from what I hear from researchers the breadth of ideas we've tried are still small)
Or plateau as in it won't solve any Millennium Prize problems within the next decade?