Comment by cedws
1 day ago
More than killer AI I'm afraid of Anthropic/OpenAI going into full rent-seeking mode so that everyone working in tech is forced to fork out loads of money just to stay competitive on the market. These companies can also choose to give exclusive access to hand picked individuals and cut everyone else off and there would be nothing to stop them.
This is already happening to some degree, GPT 5.3 Codex's security capabilities were given exclusively to those who were approved for a "Trusted Access" programme.
Describing providing a highly valuable service for money as `rent seeking` is pretty wild.
It could be, formally, if they have a monopoly.
However, I’m tempted to compare to GitHub: if I join a new company, I will ask to be included to their GitHub account without hesitation. I couldn’t possibly imagine they wouldn’t have one. What makes the cost of that subscription reasonable is not just GitHub’s fear a crowd with pitchforks showing to their office, by also the fact that a possible answer to my non-question might be “Oh, we actually use GitLab.”
If Anthropic is as good as they say, it seems fairly doable to use the service to build something comparable: poach a few disgruntled employees, leverage the promise to undercut a many-trillion-dollar company to be a many-billion dollar company to get investors excited.
I’m sure the founders of Anthropic will have more money than they could possibly spend in ten lifetimes, but I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be some competition. Maybe this time it’s different, but I can’t see how.
> It could be, formally, if they have a monopoly.
you have 2 labs at the forefront (Anthropic/OpenAI), Google closely behind, xAI/Meta/half a dozen chinese companies all within 6-12 months. There is plenty of competition and price of equally intelligent tokens rapidly drop whenever a new intelligence level is achieved.
Unless the leading company uses a model to nefariously take over or neutralize another company, I don't really see a monopoly happening in the next 3 years.
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Why, you thought rented homes aren't valuable?
Rent seeking isn't about whether the product has value or not, but about what's extracted in exchage for that value, and whether competition, lack of monopoly, lack of lock in, etc. keeps it realistic.
My housing is pretty valuable. I pay rent. Which timeline are you in?
Actually you're saying similar things:
Rent-seeking of old was a ground rent, monies paid for the land without considering the building that was on it.
Residential rents today often have implied warrants because of modern law, so your landlord is essentially selling you a service at a particular location.
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Rent seeking refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
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Two different "rent"s.
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Well don’t forget we still have competition. Were anthropic to rent seek OpenAI would undercut them. Were OpenAI and anthropic to collude that would be illegal. For anthropic to capture the entire coding agent market and THEN rent seek, these days it’s never been easier to raise $1B and start a competing lab
In practice this doesn't work though, the Mastercard-Visa duopoly is an example, two competing forces doesn't create aggressive enough competition to benefit the consumer. The only hope we have is the Chinese models, but it will always be too expensive to run the full models for yourself.
New companies can enter this space. Google’s competing, though behind. Maybe Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, or Apple will come out with top notch models at some point.
There is no real barrier to a customer of Anthropic adopting a competing model in the future. All it takes is a big tech company deciding it’s worth it to train one.
On the other hand, Visa/Mastercard have a lot of lock-in due to consumers only wanting to get a card that’s accepted everywhere, and merchants not bothering to support a new type of card that no consumer has. There’s a major chicken and egg problem to overcome there.
> In practice this doesn't work though, the Mastercard-Visa duopoly is an example,
MC/Visa duopoly is an example of lock-in via network effects. Not sure that that applies to a product that isn't affected by how many other people are running it.
Chinese competition can always be banned. Example: Chinese electric car competition
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> More than killer AI I'm afraid of Anthropic/OpenAI going into full rent-seeking mode so that everyone working in tech is forced to fork out loads of money just to stay competitive on the market.
You should be more concerned about killer AI than rent seeking by OpenAI and Anthropic. AI evolving to the point of losing control is what scientists and researchers have predicted for years; they didn’t think it would happen this quickly but here we are.
This market is hyper competitive; the models from China and other labs are just a level or two below the frontier labs.
but you are assuming that the magical wizards are the only ones who can create powerful AIs... mind you these people have been born just few decades ago. Their knowledge will be transferred and it will only take a few more decades until anyone can train powerful AIs ... you can only sit on tech for so long before everyone knows how to do it
It's not a matter of knowledge, it's a matter of resources. It takes billions of dollars of hardware to train a SOTA LLM and it's increasing all the time. You cannot possibly hope to compete as an independent or small startup.
> It takes billions of dollars of hardware to train a SOTA LLM and it's increasing all the time.
True, but it's also true that the returns from throwing money to the problem are diminishing. Unless one of those big players invents a new, propriatery paradigm, the gap between a SOTA model and an open model that runs on consumer hardware will narrow in the next 5 years.
Eventually these super expensive SXM data center GPUs will cost pennies on the dollar, and we’ll be able to snatch up H200s for our homelabs. Give it a decade.
Also eventually these WEIGHTS will leak. You can’t have the world’s most valuable data that can just be copied to a hard drive stay in the bottle forever, even if it’s worth a billion dollars. Somehow, some way, that genie’s going to get out, be it by some spiteful employee with nothing to lose, some state actor, or just a fuck up of epic proportions.
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Presumably, the hardware to run this level of model will be democratized within the timeframe of the parent comment.
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Unless, of course, the powerful manage to scare everyone about how the machines will kill us all and so AI technology needs to be properly controlled by the relevant authorities, and anyone making/using an unlicensed AI is arrested and jailed.
With Gemma-4 open and running on laptops and phones I see the flip side. How many non-HN users or researchers even need Opus 4.6e level performance? OpenAI, Anthropric and Google may be “rent seeking” from large corporations — like the Oracles and IBMs.
Everyone, once AI diffuses enough. You’ll be unhireable if you don’t use AI in a year or two.
You know, they have competitors?
The thing is that the current models can ALREADY replicate most software-based products and services on the market. The open source models are not far behind. At a certain point I'm not sure it matters if the frontier models can do faster and better. I see how they're useful for really complex and cutting edge use cases, but that's not what most people are using them for.