It depends on what you think is going to happen with models.

The way I see it, models were always predicated on openness and data-sharing. That, too, will be the competitive downfall of those who poured billions into creating said models.

They won't stay caged up forever. Ultimately the only thing OpenAI has between itself and it's competitors is some really strong computers.

Well... anybody can buy strong computers. This is, of course, assuming you don't believe the promise of ever-increasing cognition and eventual AGI, which I don't. The people going fast aren't going to be the winners. The second movers and later on will be. They get all the model, with 1/100th the cost.

Ultimately models, right now, for most consumers, are nothing more than novelties. Just look at Google Pixel - I have one, by the way. I can generate a custom image? Neat... I guess. It's a cool novelty. I can edit people out of my pictures? Well... actually Apple had that a couple years ago... and it's not as useful as you would think.

It's hard to see it because we're programmers, but right now, the AI products are really lacking for consumers. They're not good for music, or TV, or Movies, or short-form entertainment. ChatGPT is neat for specific usecases like cheating on an essay or vibe coding, but how many people are doing that? Very, very few.

Let me put it this way. Do I think Claude Code is good? Yes. Do I think Claude Code is the next Madonna? No.

> They are paying Google rather than building out their own products.

This is the real death knell people should focus on. Apple buried their AI R&D to rush complete flops like Vision Pro out the door. Now that the dust has settled, the opportunity cost of these hardware ventures was clearly a mistake. Apple had more than a decade to sharpen their knives and prepare for war with Nvidia, and now they're missing out on Nvidia's share of the datacenter market. Adding insult to injury, they're probably also ~10 years behind SOTA in the industry unless they hire well-paid veterans at great expense.

Apple's chronic disdain for unprofitable products, combined with boneheaded ambition, will be the death of them. They cannot obviate real innovation and competition while dropping nothingburger software and hardware products clearly intended to bilk an unconscious userbase.

Apple doesn't need its own model--it can license Google's model; or if terms are inprofitable, license Anthropic's or OpenAI's or Mistral's etc. And eventually it can build its own model.

Think of how important it is for any AI model company to be the go-to model on the iPhone. Google pays Apple billions to be the default search engine on the iPhone.

We begrudgingly accept chat as the lowest common denominator when there is no better option, but it's clear we don't prefer it when better options are available. Just look in any fast food restaurant that has adopted those ordering terminals and see how many are still lining up at the counter to chat with the cashier... In fact, McDonalds found that their sales rose by 30% when they eliminated chatting from the process, so clearly people found it to be a hinderance.

We don't know what is better for this technology yet, so it stands to reason that we reverted to the lowest common denominator again, but there is no reason why we will or will want to stay there. Someone is bound to figure out a better way. Maybe even Apple. That business was built on being late to the party. Although, granted, it remains to be seen if that is something it can continue with absent of Jobs.

> Chat is like the command line, but with easier syntax.

I kinda disagree with this analogy.

The command line is precise, concise, and opaque. If you know the right incantations, you can do some really powerful things really quickly. Some people understand the rules behind it, and so can be incredibly efficient with it. Most don't, though.

Chat with LLMs is fuzzy, slow-and-iterative... and differently opaque. You don't need to know how the system works, but you can probably approach something powerful if you accept a certain amount of saying "close, but don't delete files that end in y".

The "differently-opaque" for LLM chatbots comes in you needing to ultimately trust that the system is going to get it right based on what you said. The command line will do exactly what you told it to, if you know enough to understand what you told it to. The chatbot will do... something that's probably related to what you told it to, and might be what it did last time you asked for the same thing, or might not.

For a lot of people the chatbot experience is undeniably better, or at least lets them attempt things they'd never have even approached with the raw command line.

> Chat is like the command line

Exactly. Nobody really wants to use the command-line as the primary mode of computing; even the experts who know how to use it well. People will accept it when there is no better tool for the job, but it is not going to become the preferred way to use computers again no matter how much easier it is to use this time. We didn't move away from the command-line simply because it required some specialized knowledge to use.

Chatting with LLMs looks pretty good right now because we haven't yet figured out a better way, but there is no reason to think we won't figure out a better way. Almost certainly people will revert to chat for certain tasks, like people still use the command-line even today, but it won't be the primary mode of computing like the current crop of services are betting on. This technology is much too valuable for it to stay locked in shitty chat clients (and especially shitty chat clients serving advertisements, which is the inevitable future for these businesses betting on chat — they can't keep haemorrhaging money forever and individuals won't pay enough for a software service).