The companies operating frontier models and AI as a viable technology on the scale it exists today are inseparable. If the big players died tomorrow you’d still have that vastly inferior local model that would be good enough for light work for awhile, but without all the eye-popping amounts of money to continue training and scraping data on unprecedented scale, its usefulness would fade over time. Most companies today would not feasibly be able to host and train their own models to be used in the ways they use frontier models today.
LLMs would still exist as a niche solution for some things but what AI fundamentally is, and how it could be used would be entirely different in very short order.