Comment by notfromhere

A very good comparison. Why are electric companies and railways state-owned? Of course, not entirely. They have a string of private companies, but the core is state-owned and monopolistic. OpenAI will be like that. It is already flirting with the government to get the best access and be able to control the thinking of officials. Manipulation of officials and politicians. Isn't that beautiful and self-perpetuating profit?

> If AI really becomes that ubiquitous then OpenAI capturing that value is no less ridiculous than ComEd capturing the value of every application of electric power.

They do? The electric provider, last I checked, does notcapture the value of every application of electric power.

Some business uses (amongst other things) $1 of electricity to make a widget that they then sell $100 - the value there is captured by the business, not by the provider.

Same with tokens; the provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, whoever) provides tokens, but the business selling a solution using those tokens would be charging many orders of magnitude more for those tokens when those tokens are packed into the solution.

The provider can't just raise prices to capture the value (cos then the business would switch to a new provider, or if they all raise prices, the business would self-host), they have to compete with the business by selling the same solution.

Going back to the electric company analogy, if the electricity supplier wants to capture more of the value in the widget, they have to create the widget themselves and compete with the business who is currently creating the widget.

If the business has a moat of any type (including customer service, customisation, market differentiation, etc) the electricity provider is out of luck.

What OpenAI has is the know-how in developing new models and training them efficiently. That's a kind of value they can provide even in a world where open-sourced local models are in common use.