I'm the head of R&D at Rev.ai and this is exactly what we've seen in ASR. We started at $1.20/hr, and our new models are $0.10/hr in < 2 years. We have done human transcription for ~15 years and the revenue from ASR is 3 orders of magnitude less ($90/hr vs $0.10/hr) and it will likely go lower. However, our volumes are many orders of magnitude higher now for serving ASR, so it's about even or growth in most cases still.
I think for Mistral to compete with Meta they need a better API. The on-prem/self-hosted people will always choose the best models for themselves and you won't be able to monetize them in a FOSS world anyways, so you just need the better platform. Right now, Meta isn't providing a top-tier platform, but that may eventually change.
Hard to imagine anyone competing with AWS/GCP/Azure for slices of GPUs/TPU. AFAIK, most major models are available a la carte via API on these providers (with a few exclusives). I can’t imagine how anyone can compete the big clouds on serving an API, and I can’t imagine them staying “non compliant” for long.
I don't quite follow your argument - what exactly is Meta competing for? It doesn't sell access to a hosted models and shows no interest of being involved in the cloud business. My guess is Meta is driven by enabling wider adoption of AI, and their bet is more (AI-generated) content is good for its existing content-hosting-and-ad-selling business, and good for it's aspirational Metaverse business too, should it pan out.