I'm noticing competitve edge doesn't last as long as it used to and it's hard to predict how long a business model will be relevant e.g.

5 years ago, startups were offering customised chatbots, now ChatGPT style variants will replace those

NovelAI was apparently the best at anime image generation and its model got leaked and community trained models reduced the need for that kind of service.

elevenlabs has the best voice generator, if an open source model became available at similar quality, why would most people pay elevenlabs?

It seems a business model based purely on tech. advantage is risky because of security risks and a motivated open source community. e.g if someone leaks your model, that's a huge amount of investment and competitive edge lost overnight.

I think people would pay for convenience, as running these models is challenging for lay people e.g. midjourney