[tjpnz]

>in the fear that their engineers would build competing products.

Is there any evidence to support this? It would imply that even their least promising employees would still pose a threat which seems unlikely.

[cellis]

What they really meant by this is: “Competing products [at peer companies]”.

This is still in effect, however the primary competing products at peer rivals is now “foundational ai”, and they need far less people and mostly people of a very specific skill sets of ML research, Inference Scaling, Hardware R&D, AI prompt engineering research. Also the cost to play is 10 billion minimum.

So Salesforce will perform rent seeking as long as their moat allows rather than gamble on foundational ai.