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ericmayyesterday at 6:52 PM2 repliesview on HN

No they don't, it's not 2008. Anybody off the street can get an iPhone or a free iPhone with a mobile plan. They're commodity products. Even homeless people have them.

To the extent LLMs are commodity products you're right (so far), but that is limited to the main model providers, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, &c. with interoperability on cloud platform providers and other technology providers like an Apple offering you a choice of LLM with Siri or something.

If you want to suggest that some other model is in the same bucket as those primary 3, it goes back to the crappy, cheap phone analogy which is accurate. Yea you can make calls with it, but you make calls better with an iPhone.


Replies

throwaway27448yesterday at 8:04 PM

> free iPhone with a mobile plan

I get your point but in what sense is that "free"? What mobile plan giving you an iphone doesn't come with explicit debt?

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ForHackernewstoday at 8:30 AM

Ironically you are participating in the social signalling ("crappy, cheap phone") phenomenon you claim doesn't exist.

https://mashable.com/article/apple-messages-green-doj

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/apple-green-bubble-messa...

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