Close to my thesis, but mine is the front-ends like Perplexity / SimTheory / openrouter are going to win.

They are going to win for the following reasons:

• Model leadership changes often
• Model will specialize in task or domains (code creation, image creation, music creation, etc)

This is perfect situation for front-ends to flourish. They can intelligently route you to the correct model for the task you are doing