A nice model, does not a billion dollar company make. The hard part of AI is not the model; Apple needs people to do the 80% rest-of-the-work; how do you make AI useful to the average person? How can we get inference on edge devices as cheap and efficient as possible? Models are boring. Everyone fully expects that we'll see an N% increase in intelligence every six months now. Yawn. The exciting thing now is: What are we using AI for?
Spending a couple billion dollars also doesn't make an actual billion dollar company. It's yet to be proven that all this spend on LLM training and running can actually get translated into an actual profit.