> I would be surprised if companies specializing in LLMs were not major players the way today's tech giants are

I wouldn't.

The OG Internet gold rush was about centralization. (Aka "the cloud".)

This LLM bubble makes most sense if you go the other direction towards bespoke self-hosted self-owned solutions.

Hardware manufacturers will probably come on top after all this. Especially those who figure out commodity user-facing LLM hardware.