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Comment by rileyphone | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that looks so bad from an anti-trust/competitiveness standpoint. M$ is embracing AI just like it embraced the internet 25 years ago.

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How? Both Meta and Microsoft basically invented the idea of an AI runtime with PyTorch and later the ONNX framework, both of which are completely open projects that can run open models. If them join-releasing a model rings antitrust bells for you, I think you're focused on the wrong gatekeepers.

Yeah and look how they extended and extinguished that!

I mean, they dominated internet browsers by being the default option until they sucked at it so hard people downloaded alternatives.

I’m not sure you want to invite the comparison.

To be fair on that, both the US and EU governments launched antitrust cases around that with the US case narrowly avoiding having the company split up and the EU ruling resulting in requirements the browser be decoupled, followed by half a billion in fines for not doing so well enough.

Not that the two situations are anything alike, but a "and look what happened with that" argument hardly points away from valid antitrust outcomes.

I think you and parent/GP all agree? A thing can be anti competitive, and a strategic failure.

If that's what the parent and GP are saying then we definitely don't agree. In my mind, it was anticompetitive and a rousing success. Microsoft managed to fully execute the extend and extinguish phases to then hold a stranglehold on the web for roughly a decade at a cost of less than a billion dollars. Anticompetitive measures kept it from being worse, but it was far from a bad outcome for Microsoft either.

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