We're in the part of the market cycle where everyone fights for marketshare by selling dollar bills for 50 cents.
When a winner emerges they'll pull the rug out from under you and try to wall off their garden.
Anthropic just forgot that we're still in the "functioning market competition" phase of AI and not yet in the "unstoppable monopoly" phase.
all closed AI model providers will stop selling APIs in the next 2-3 years. Only open models will be available via APIs (…) Closed model providers are trying to build non-commodity capabilities and they need great UIs to deliver those. It's not just a model anymore, but an app with a UI for a purpose."
~ https://vintagedata.org/blog/posts/model-is-the-product A. Doria
> new Amp Free (10$) access is also closed up since of last night
I only use LLMs through OpenRouter and switch somewhat randomly between frontier models; they each have some amount of personality but I wouldn't mind much if half of them disappeared overnight, as long as the other half remained available.
I hope you're right!
A model is hard to train but it doesn't need to be hyper up to date / have a new version come out every day. Inference is cheap (it seems?) and quality is comparable. So it's unclear how expensive offerings could win over free alternatives.
I could be wrong of course. I don't have a crystal ball. I just don't think this is the same as Google.
Of course I could be entirely mistaken and there could emerge a single winner
With the AI models, using a model that is “good enough but cheaper” is already an option.
I imagine the split will look a lot like b2b vs b2c in other technologies, b2b customers tend to be willing to pay for tech when it offers a competitive advantage, reduces their operating costs etc. b2c customers mostly just guzzle free slop.
(Not quite "every", but outside of tech, most professional workplaces don't support ad blocking or Kagi.)
Software always gets monopoly simply by usage. Every time a model gets used by esoteric use cases, it gets more training data (that a decentralized open weight model doesn't get) and it starts developing its moat.
Most software isn't made by monopolies. More directly, enterprise-software stocks are getting hammered because AI offers them competition.
They bundled it with PC hw and the vast majority of apps only ever got published for windows, and this over decades (one would argue it’s still true).
The starting point for LLMs is very different. Who would publish today a software that only integrates with chatGPT? Only a small minority.
Thus I agree, I struggle to see how a monopoly can exist here. A GPU monopoly or duopoly though, perhaps.
(For those unaware, AWS doesn't have a VM monopoly, and the market dynamics seem similar)
we don't, we have about 3 operating systems that have the decades of hardware and software compatibility that makes them widely usable. They're the most complex and complicated things we've built. LLMs are a few thousand lines of python hooked up to a power plant and graphics cards. This is the least defensible piece of software there ever has been.
And if the frontier continues favouring centralised solutions, they'll get it. If, on the other hand, scaling asymptotes, the competition will be running locally. Just looking at how much Claude complains about me not paying for SSO-tier subscriptions to data tools when they work perfectly fine in a browser is starting to make running a slower, less-capable model locally competitive with it in some research contexts.