alt Hacker News> everyone is assuming it's a winner take all market
I don't think anyone serious believes this any more. The tech is thoroughly commoditized. There are a lot of plays to be made, like OpenAI cornering memory, or spending heavily on unique data for RL, if you can stop distilling, but there is no proprietary core IP at all.
There is no way to monopolize a technology this big. It would be like monopolizing literacy.
Replies
beberlei • today at 3:00 PM
Power, natural gas, gasoline, water, mobile contracts, railways, internet access are probably better analogies. They have tendencies to (local) monopolies but also a lot of precedent and knowledge on how to regulate and break them, how to introduce competition.
➕ show 2 replies
It's not the AI technology itself that is being monopolized, it's the data necessary to train it.
More specifically: when everything you could previously have earned money with is subsumed by AI, the "frontier" of profitable knowledge exists solely with the highest concentration of capital. Because that's where the highest amount of compute and consequently valuable data is.
Already now the idea of the tech being "commoditized" is true only if you exclusively look at the bubble of rich countries. AI-worthy compute is prohibitively expensive otherwise for individuals.