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Comment by foxfired | Hacker News Reader

We need to reframe it. At this point, what we call "AI" is not a technology, but a subscription company.

A technology is a tool you can adopt in your toolchain to perform at task, even if in this case it's outsourcing cognitive load. For a subscription company, well, as long as the subscription is active, you get to outsource some of the cognitive load. When Anthropic's CEO says that white color jobs will disappear, he means that he is selling Enterprise subscriptions, and that companies will inevitably buy it.

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It's only a matter of time before AI becomes a commodity. The open source models are just a generation behind the proprietary ones and they're almost good enough for most users. Even if we're somehow limited to using proprietary models, since all of these "AIs" are based on natural language so you can practically hot swap the LLMs. Any company banking on selling any service other than AI hosting is going to be incredibly disappointed.

The only thing that could stop this commodification is some sort of vendor lock-in, but that looks to be technically challenging.

Windows gaming finally falling to desktop Linux, in terms of tech and mindshare among enthusiasts, proves to me that given a sufficiently large timescale open solutions tend to always win against a proprietary ones.

Companies just can't seem to stay focused on their own core competencies after a few decades. On the other hand, even when open projects "die" they can be resurrected ad infinitum.

Just my gut feeling but it seems like closed wins out big in the short term, but open wins in the end. Not applicable to everything I know.

I’m not sure I agree. Windows still has 95% market share in Steam’s hardware report. And even the modest gains that Linux has seen in this space have been as much a result of the efforts of a few small companies who have financial interests in undermining Microsoft’s monopoly as it has been a display of grassroots enthusiasm for open ecosystems.

The thing about market share is that it looks like sigmoid function. It's way more difficult to climb from 1% to 2% than from 40% to 50%.

Entrenched technologies take a while to un-trench; there's a lead lag on that kind of thing.

It starts with the kids saying I hate Windows. Then the adults. Then finally the grandmas. Windows will be evaporating marketshare for decades, like a long-half life on an unstable isotope.

I agree that it is still too early to call it, but note how SteamOS still hasn't officially come out on laptops/desktops yet.

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