As much I agree with your sentiment, but I doubt the intention is singular.
That's how it supposed to work.
I hope it does, though I'm doubtful because distribution is important. You can't beat "ChatGPT" as a brand in laypeople's minds (unless perhaps you give them a massive "Temu: Shop Like A Billionaire" commercial campaign).
Closed source AI is almost by design morphing into an industrial, infrastructure-heavy rocket science that commoners can't keep up with. The companies pushing it are building an industry we can't participate or share in. They're cordoning off areas of tech and staking ground for themselves. It's placing a steep fence around tech.
I hope every such closed source AI effort is met with equivalent open source and that the investments made into closed AI go to zero.
The most likely outcome is that Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic win and every other "lab"-shaped company dies an expensive death. RunwayML spent hundreds of millions and they're barely noticeable now.
These open source models hasten the deaths of the second tier also-ran companies. As much as I hope for dents in the big three, I'm doubtful.
Even when the technical people understood that, it would be too much of a political quagmire within their company when it became known to the higher ups. It just isn’t worth the political capital.
They would feel the same way about using xAI or maybe even Facebook models.
2020 - I was a mid level (L5) cloud consultant at AWS with only two years of total AWS experience and that was only at a small startup before then. Yet every customer took my (what in hindsight might not have been the best) advice all of the time without questioning it as long as it met their business goals. Just because I had @amazon.com as my email address.
Late 2023 - I was the subject matter expert in a niche of a niche in AWS that the customer focused on and it was still almost impossible to get someone to listen to a consultant from a shitty third rate consulting company.
2025 - I left the shitty consulting company last year after only a year and now work for one with a much better reputation and I have a better title “staff consultant”. I also play the game and be sure to mention that I’m former “AWS ProServe” when I’m doing introductions. Now people listen to me again.
All tech companies offering free services.
I’m not saying this to insult the technical capabilities of Uber. But it doesn’t have the economics that most tech companies have - high fixed costs and very low marginal costs. Uber has high marginal costs saving a little on inference isn’t going to make a difference.
Obviously, some US brands do not compete on price, but other than maybe Jeep and Tesla, those have a small market penetration.
All the clouds compete on price. Do you really think it is that differentiated? Google, Amazon and Microsoft all offer special deals to sign big companies up and globally too.
Microsoft doesn’t compete on price. Their major competitive advantage is Big Enterprise is already big into Microsoft and it’s much easier to get them to come onto Azure. They compete on price only when it comes to making Windows workloads Bd SQL Server cheaper than running on other providers.
AWS is the default choice for legacy reasons and it definitely has services an offerings that Google doesn’t have. I have never once been on a sales call where the sales person emphasizes that AWS is cheaper.
As far as GCP, they are so bad at evterprise sales, we never really looked at them as serious competition.
Sure AWS will throw credits in for migrations and professional services both internally and for third party partners. But no CFO is going to look at just the short term credits.
Despite all that and whatever you say, the fact is you do compete. It doesn't have to be a race to the bottom.
So Cloudfront free tier and the latest discount bundles etc aren't to compete? People have also negotiated private pricing way below list price and a lot cheaper than competitors.
Similarly was the Dynamodb price cuts not due to competition?
I can give way more examples...
All technology gets cheaper over time. There is a difference between lowering price in response to competitors and finding the profit maximizing price based on supply and demand.
AWS was lowering prices to increase demand before GCP and Azure were a thing.
Jassy said right before he became CEO of Amazon and he was still over AWS that only 5% of IT spend was on any cloud provider. They are capturing non consumption and marketing value of AWS vs that.
While I don’t have any insider experience about Azure, looking on the outside, I would think that Azure’s go to market is also not competing against AWS on price, but trying to get on prem customers on Azure.
And most startups are just doing prompt engineering that will never go anywhere. The big companies will just throw a couple of developers at the feature and add it to their existing business.
Before that I spent 6 years working between 3 companies in health care in a tech lead role. I’m 100% sure that any of those companies would I have immediately questioned my judgment for suggesting DeepSeek if had been a thing.
Absolutely none of them would ever have touched DeepSeek.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-240/su...
Note: I am neither a lawyer nor in financial circles, but I do have an interest in the effects of market design and regulation as we get into a more deeply automated space.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/clarify-mode...
If you'd spent anytime working at one for swe you won't have access to popular open source frameworks, let alone Chinese LLMs. The LLM development is mostly occurring through collaborations with the regional LLM businesses or internal labs.
Although I did just check what regions AWS bedrock support Deepseek and their govcloud regions do not, so that's a good reason not to use it. Still, on prem on a segmented network, following CMMC, probably permissable
Chinese models generally aren't but DeepSeek specifically is at this point.
Of course you’ll always have exceptions (government, military and etc.), but for private, winner will take it all.
Companies just need to get to the “if” part first. That or they wash their hand by using a reseller that can use whatever it wants under the hood.
Any kind of hardware that is somehow connected to the wired or wireless communication interfaces is much more dangerous than any software.
Backdoors embedded in such hardware devices may be impossible to identify before being activated by the reception of some "magic" signals from outside.
https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/airbnb-picks-alibabas-qwen...
The fact that it's customer service means it's dealing with text entered by customers, which has privacy and other consequences.
So no, it's not "pretty inconsequential". Many more companies fit a profile like that than whatever arbitrary criteria you might have in mind for "consequential".
Well for non-American companies, you have the choice between Chinese models that don't send data home, and American ones that do, with both countries being more or less equally threatening.
I think if Mistral can just stay close enough to the race it will win many customers by not doing anything.
I'm not sure if technical people who don't understand this deserve the moniker technical in this context.