Comment by swatcoder
2 days ago
At this stage, they certainly have the right to refuse whatever tasks they'd like, but even rightful actions come with consequences.
The more they exercise that right, and the more reactively so, the more they erode the ability for customers to rely on their product staying available to them in the long term. If I need to worry that Anthropic might shut down some critical element my workflow on any given week, then I'm incentivized to either keep my workflows very portable and light-footed (goodbye moat) or take my business to a vendor I can better rely on (goodbye customer).
> take my business to a vendor I can better rely on
This competition phase of AI will be short-lived. It will soon monopolize (or have the equivalent effect of a few big vendors having unwritten and unspoken collusion agreements that have them all behave in lockstep). This is where the profit is, and also the place where they don't care what you want.
Yeah yeah, open weight opens models. I wouldn't count on it. People in the billions still use microsoft despite how hostile they are the customer. Some will find an alternative but most won't.
I'm not sure if an anecdote about the average Joe (billions still use Microsoft) really applies to educated techies (developers writing code). Since we are all trying to predict the future here, I guess we'll find out.
Most people who don’t want to do the things you listed can/will use the big, cheap services, sure. But do you really believe that people who want to produce ‘free’ copies of licensed software, or hack, etc won’t use open models, especially as RAM supply catches up with supply? (And even more so as long as open models don’t suddenly stop improving.)