Comment by aspenmartin
1 day ago
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
Just in one particular country. That hurts their labs, but there are ~190 other countries in the world for Chinese to sell their products to, just like they do with their cars.
And businesses from these other countries would happily switch to Chinese. From security perspective both Chinese and US espionage is equally bad, so why care if it all comes down to money and performance.
That's what OP was saying, I think, noting that running them locally won't be a solution.
Also Chinese smartphones. Huawei was about 12-18 months from becoming the biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world a few years ago. If it would have been allowed to sell its phones freely in the US I'm fairly sure Apple would have been closer to Nokia than to current day Apple.
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