That's a fair point. That probably makes more sense, especially when viewed from a company-specific perspective. Each individual actor probably has much more to gain by trying to actually compete than by trying to commoditize the complement.
If viewed from a national perspective, then the decision calculus could get more confusing. I can imagine that commoditizing LLMs might cost substantially less than trying to be a leader in the space. Of course, there is also less to gain in commoditizing LLMs versus being a leader.
I'm not sure, though, and you bring up good points.
For reference, I think a common approximation is one token being 0.75 words.
For a 100 page book, that translates to around 50,000 tokens. For 1 mil+ tokens, we need to be looking at 2000+ page books. That's pretty rare, even for documentation.
It doesn't have to be text-based, though. I could see films and TV shows becoming increasingly important for long-context model training.
If viewed from a national perspective, then the decision calculus could get more confusing. I can imagine that commoditizing LLMs might cost substantially less than trying to be a leader in the space. Of course, there is also less to gain in commoditizing LLMs versus being a leader.
I'm not sure, though, and you bring up good points.