This isn't sustainable. They're banking that nobody else is going to be able to achieve GPT-4-like quality, and what with us basically being at near the bottom of the vertical bit of the growth curve, I'd say that's a little like betting that nobody's going to be able to build a car that beats the Model T's performance. Meta is trying to tackle very large language models in the same way that they got React to be so good and widely supported: by taking it open source. Google, on the other hand, is currently working on having LLMs running natively on phones and tablets. That's not to speak of the fully open source models. Yeah, running a 1.6 trillion parameter GPT-based LLM is fucking expensive and difficult to replicate, but there are newer, more efficient techniques popping up around LLMs at a dizzying pace. It's only a matter of time before someone comes up with something that's at least as good as GPT 4.