alt Hacker NewsThis argument is a bit scattered. "Rent seeking" is being misused here. It's a relatively new term (~50 years old) but it has a lot of history behind it, specifically with enclosures. The Enclosure Acts [1] were a series of laws that took what was common property open to all and made them private property. This was embryonic capitalism [2].
Anyway, I remember that Google demo of making restaurant reservations. I believe it was scripted and had a human fallback. Little did we know that Google would drop the bag on the whole transformer thing that came out soon after. I wouldn't be surprised if it was some of the same people involved.
What the author is talking about isn't rent-seeking per se but a moat. The entire proposition of OpenAI is that they can build a moat and recoup the billions of investment. I'm not convinced that's true, which is part of the author's point, for some of the same reasons:
1. Cost of hardware and training and tokens keeps going down. We saw the same thing with Bitcoin mining. I wonder if we'll see ASICs enter the fray here too; and
2. China will make sure no one company owns this future. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. It is a national security issue for China.
Where I disagree is that this will be an end for the rent-seeking class. I think we're bouldering towards a dystopian future of even more wealth concentration where most people get displaced by automation and AI, which suppresses wages and ultimately leads to a situation where a handful of people have all the money and almost everyone else has no money.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act
[2]: https://medium.com/@jrcoleman97/the-hidden-origins-of-capita...
> This argument is a bit scattered. "Rent seeking" is being misused here.
It's being used in a more literal-meanings-of-the-words sense ("pursuing monopoly rents") rather than the narrow economic term-of-art sense of "pursuing monopoly rents through influence over public policy by means that do not create, or which inhibit the creation of, additional wealth" (the definition you seem to be complaining about it not adhering to without actually providing.)
But most of the usages would also be correct in the narrower sense, because virtually ever actor referred to as rent-seeking in the broader sense are also rent-seeking in the narrow sense as part of that. (E.g., actively lobbying for "safety" regulation which would disproportionately impair non-incumbent new competitors.)
> What the author is talking about isn't rent-seeking per se but a moat.
Pursuing a moat is just another term for seeking monopoly rents by any means, including rent-seeking in the narrow sense.
(There's also obviously an ideological angle in creating the term "rent seeking" as a term of criticism to those seeking monopoly rents through means that the creators of the term disapprove of, excluding seeking the same kind of rents by other means from "rent seeking".)