The author makes no effort to explain why AI :isn’t: a commodity as Apple and Amazon says. I was looking forward to that. I think the article is weak for not defending its premise. Everything else is fluff.

I agree - and if the article is correct and Apple and Amazon are the losers, I fail to glean who the winners will be or how their business model will be different.

That's fair, but it wasn't the point of the article because it's messy. Many would argue that core LLMs are 'trending' toward commodity, and I'd agree.

But it's complicated because commodities don't carry brand weight, yet there's obviously a brand power law. I (like most other people) use ChatGPT. But for coding I use Claude and a bit of Gemini, etc. depending on the problem. If they were complete commodities, it wouldn't matter much what I used.

A part of the issue here is that while LLMs may be trending toward commodity, "AI" isn't. As more people use AI, they get locked into their habits, memory (customization), ecosystem, etc. And as AI improves if everything I do has less and less to do with the hardware and I care more about everything else, then the hardware (e.g. iPhone) becomes the commodity.

Similar with AWS if data/workflow/memory/lock-in becomes the moat I'll want everything where the rest of my infra is.