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Traster • today at 1:00 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

I think there's just some core arguments here that you can totally reasonably disagree with

>In theory, an AI company has to be worried about their users switching over to a competitor or using an open source model instead. In practice, this isn't a major concern. For starters, the average person...

There's two things to disagree with here. First, this isn't theory, I work at a company and use AI heavily, switching model is as simple as changing a line in a json file. And would I do it? I've done it like 5 times this year. Claude was good, then openai was for a while, then there were times gemini was great for quick trivial tasks, now I'm mainly back on opus-5-5 with astra for some more complex tasks. Secondly, I'm not the average person, no, I'm the person openai and anthropic actually make money from. Sure, a consumer might be stickier, but so far they're not really making money from consumers, they're mainly doing B2B.

The core thing that bugs me is not so much that AI is going to be massively unprofitable, I think there's definitely going to be profitable companies. I just think if you're Google, the best case scenario is you're transitioning from fantastic economies of scale in a monopoly business to a business with costs roughly proportional to revenue and no moat. That is really bad for Google and it's not unreasonable to think it's motivation enough for them to try and undercut Anthropic and OpenAI until they're bankrupt.


Replies

PinkaDunka • today at 1:03 PM

But you are switching between all of the same names. You are not switching away from AI. So why would AI bubble pop?

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