The period's deals, with device makers contracting third-party models instead of training their own, describe a structural change: the model became a purchasable input, and the contest moved to whoever controls the relationship with the end user.
The logic matches other sectors that travelled this path. While a component is scarce and hard, whoever manufactures it holds power; once it becomes a commodity available from several suppliers, power migrates to whoever has the distribution channel and the brand.
What accelerates that transition in artificial intelligence is the existence of open-weights models with quality close to the frontier. They establish a floor available without a subscription, limiting how much can be charged for access.
For model companies, that explains the period's vertical integration moves: buying development tooling, acquiring execution environments and designing their own hardware are all ways out of the input-supplier position.
For anyone building products, the practical consequence is good and demands discipline: you can switch model suppliers without rebuilding the product, provided the architecture was designed for it from the start.