I'm not forced to drink Coke or Pepsi if I go to a bar. Only if I specifically want a cola I very likely get whatever cola they got (likely either Coke or Pepsi). If you want to use a computer, it will have DRAM, and you'll end up with one of the DRAM hardware manufacturers.

> Let's remember that OpenAI came from basically nowhere -- to give Google a run for its money -- as did Google with Microsoft's behemoth 20+ years ago...

Yeah, but the capital behind it certainly did not:

> OpenAI was initially founded as a nonprofit organization by Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research. When OpenAI launched in 2015, it had raised pledges for $1 billion. [1]

Altman was well connected, with rich friends. People like Thiel and Musk. Under the guise of a non-profit they eventually pulled a rug to make OpenAI for-profit.

The barrier of entry for hardware design is also just plain different than software. There was a good talk on that recently on 39c3.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman