I hope we find a path to at least fine-tuning medium sized models for prices that aren't outrageous. Even the tiny corp's tinybox [1] is $15k and I don't know how much actual work one could get done on it.
If the majority of startups are just "wrappers around OpenAI (et al.)" the reason is pretty obvious.
Should I complain that to drill oil I need hundreds of millions of dollars to even start?
Your VPS example was doing barely any computation. You're conflating web 1.0 and web 2.0 with neural networks and they are nothing alike in terms of FLOPS.