It's gonna be interesting to see how this plays out. Usually a tech rugpull like this lasts a number of years. And this sort of has, but the agentic stuff has really only caught on like wildfire in the last, I dunno, six months or so. The rugpull would be way more effective if there could be several years of getting developers addicted to this development paradigm, but alas, the VC money burned was too great to subsidize for very long.
Its also a weird way to cede control of the market to the foreign model vendors, because I'm reasonably sure that DeepSeek et al aren't subsidising tokens to the same extent that the big 3's subscription models have been.
I think there's "sort of" a moat for non-Chinese vendors. As much as people distrust the US right now, I think deep down inside everyone knows that the second you let a Chinese provider do inference on your codebase they're gonna suck up every bit of it. But hey, cheap tokens, right?
So you'll probably never see government customers allow that and neither will a lot of commercial customers.
Why do we assume us providers aren't doing the same? Also all the Chinese providers are giving open weight models. Many you can run locally.
I don't see the risk. If your code is easily AI generated you don't have a moat anyways. A Chinese competitor probably won't have as easy of a time as a US one of you operate in the US
The US has robust IP and trademark law that allows companies some amount of chance to find a legal remedy to anyone who clones their business. China is notorious for protecting local companies from foreign IP suits.
Further, at a lot of companies, the risk has to be acceptable to shareholders and auditors. Perceived risk is often a more powerful motivator than actual risk.
From the perspective of someone currently living in the EU... I'd say thats pretty much a wash (or even slightly tilted in China's favour) for folks outside the US
Fortunately there’s plenty of open weight models that are just safetensors and you have a wide variety of providers to choose from, as well as just hosting it yourself.
If that is true, we’ve discovered that offering a product for $1 the $17, yields to dramatically shorter runway but possibly more addicted users. Can’t wait for products offered at $1 the $100.
Maybe, but this is also a company whose parent organization is worth a trillion+ dollars that have monopolies in multiple verticals. I know American corpos hate the idea of protecting the commons and would rather fuck it raw to fulfill their carnal urge for profit, but you know there are some public goods and services worth fulfilling for a highly productive industry.
Maybe the government should nationalize GitHub at this point as it is absolutely critical for US infrastructure and MSFT has shown to be a terrible steward for the public.