How so? Search was way less capital intensive than AI to develop. We started with dozens of search engines back in the 90s and we still ended up with a near monopoly.

Edit: All major AI companies have millions if not billions of funding either from VCs or parent companies. You can't start an AI company "in your garage" and be "ramen profitable".

Edit 2: You don't even need to monopolize anything. All major search engines are ad-driven and insert sponsored content above "organic" search results because it's such an obvious way to make money from search. So even if there wasn't a product monopoly, there's still a business model "monopoly". Why would the same pattern not repeat for "sponsored" purchases for agentic shopping?

Not really. Any competitors that start to get traction can just get bought out by the big players for enough money that they'd be stupid to refuse.

And who's going to stop that? This government?

You will have a 3rd party agent, in your home, that you get your news and information from, controlled by a for-profit entity, literally conspiring against you, the product, to squeeze you for every cent in your bank account, to put you in debt, to funnel your money directly to its masters. A Grima Wormtongue at your shoulder at all times, making your decisions for you, controlling your access to information, a slave to a company whose entire goal is to capture your attention and money and prevent you from ever learning anything negative about anyone who pays them money, and ever learning anything positive about anyone who they don't like. And you're going to make completely rational decisions?

Why do we all keep making the same obvious mistakes over and over? Once you are the product, thousands of highly paid experts will spend 40+ hours per week thinking of new ways to covertly exploit you for profit. They will be much better at it than you're giving them credit for.

I think even easier in fact - what's happening behind the scenes w/ an LLM is far more opaque