[e9]

I want to propose alternative reality where 1.5-2.5T in value doesn't go to a handful of companies. Instead it turns out to be like restaurants where this gets distributed to lots and lots of small, local, mostly interchangeable teams. There will of course be some super star "chefs" leading the industry and setting trends and some "restaurant chain" like big businesses and supply chain for all of this.

[keeda]

FWIW I do think that availability of competitive open weight and other non-frontier models, along with improvements in harnesses that can get good results out of these models, will result in less concentration and a healthier marketplace.

However, these frontier labs are also making moves that could let them capture a disproportionate share of the upside. One possibility is a situation analogous to the smartphone manufacturing space, where there are dozens of players but just a handful (e.g. Apple, Samsung in smartphones) capture the lion's share of the revenue.

[skeptic_ai]

Apple you can’t exit the ecosystem.

Samsung the same. And is the best android device.

If tomorrow comes a Nokia os will be dead in the water: it has no apps.

But with a new llm that doesn’t matter. There is nothing sticky about typing Gemini, Claude or codex in a cli.

[keeda]

There's nothing sticky today but you can bet they're working maniacally to fix that. These companies will make most of their money in the enterprise space and there are probably unlimited ways to engineer stickiness in an enterprise setting. Like, MSFT still rakes in those billions despite pretty much every one of their products having commodity competitors.

The AI labs are also making moves to secure long-term enterprise presence, such as their Forward Deployed Engineer strategy. I think that is a trojan horse play that could make enterprises dependent on them forever, much like so many companies are still dependent on IBM's mainframes. As an extreme example, you could imagine a company's core business logic encoded in the weights of a proprietary model custom-trained and hosted by one of these model providers, something even more inscrutable and sticky than ancient COBOL codebases.

[xxpor]

The world is not zero sum. Value is created, not just preserved. Anthropic and OpenAI creating value does not imply that smaller guys can not also create value.

[afavour]

But marketplaces also exist and big players in a marketplace are often able to manipulate the market such that they are advantaged and small players are not able to break in.

[mpyne]

This is true of every market that has ever existed, and that's not stopped small players from finding niches.

[bdamm]

How? Training and operating models seems to naturally focus on those willing to invest quite significantly in these operations.

[nish__]

If RAM prices come down, running your own models will be relatively affordable.

[actionfromafar]

Sysco is pretty big.