Comment by mattmanser
5 months ago
You mean the history where MS captured the OS, Applle/Google the phone, Google capture the entire search market for 20 years, Facebook the social web, Amazon shopping, NVidia/AMD, Netflix, Spotify, I could go on and on and on.
Most things in tech settle into monopolies or duopolies.
LLMs are more akin to the search market than the database market. They need to be updated constantly.
Selectively picking out the one technology that's basically no-one's primary business is an odd way to try and convince me. It must be over 20 years now since any large company consider a DB to be a significant product.
Open source winners like Linux and MySql/Postgre are the oddity, not the norm.
You made a more specific claim than it being captured by a monopoly or duopoly. You claimed that the leaders definitively will cause dramatic price increases implying that the current pricing are just for capturing market share (ala uber/lyft).
Yet for every example you just delivered that _did not happen_. OSes have wide choice including a free option that is widely used, phones got cheaper, Amazon does not have a monopoly for online shopping, Netflix and Spotify compete in extremely cut throat markets with very low margin. Then there are the other players that tried that exact model and are failing (eg doordash and Grubhub).
The “bait and switch” approach requires there to be no viable alternative. Where we’ve seen that is in products with very strong network effects. To date the ai market doesn’t display that, if you don’t like cursor go to vs code, if Claude is better than Gemini it is trivial to switch, etc.