AI is full of new and smaller companies. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are quite new, but growing fast.

They got burned by over-promising Apple Intelligence and then embarking on a so-far failed, rudderless journey to land features regular people actually gave a shit about. I’m no expert, but I reckon the exact right move is concentrating on their actual deliverable products and features and letting everyone else blow their cash on a maybe months-long moat for dubiously useful advances in categories most of their customers wish everyone would stop talking about.

Didn’t Amazon invest a total of $8 billion in Anthropic? Seems like a much better choice than trying to do things in-house.

Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t even invested in any of the players.

What about Amazon’s work in formal verification research and Apple’s machine learning research?

[1] https://www.amazon.science/tag/formal-verification

[2] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research

One thought I had recently: Their shareholders are probably mostly the same people. So why even compete?

Isn’t this something like how everything ends up evolving into a crab?

They’re just turning into conglomerates.

It was common in the post wwii era in America and its Asian allies like Korea with its chaebols and Japan with its somethings I can’t remember the name of. The Asian countries forms were normally based around a single family, we’ll need more time with the current US form to see if they are also dynastic

Stakeholders expect (and price assets for) endless growth.

I don't know, there doesn't seem to be much overlap to me. Apple is a hardware business, Microsoft is software, Google is search, Facebook is social media, Amazon is distribution and compute. They do have their fingers in each other's pies but not to a large extent.

Which is a godsend for the users. Can you imagine a world where there is only one big cloud provide, say AWS, and all the big companies with the infra just sit out? Can you imagine how expensive AWS would be and how much power it has over the users?

They'll just buy the competition once it seems like it's at a good price. Capitalism leads to concentration.

That’s what happens when you print trillions of dollars. Suddenly investors have too much Monopoly money and they want to spend it on something, anything, that might not make as much of a loss as holding cash during the subsequent inflation.

Just FTR - it's VERY rare for people to come up with more than one winning idea

Once a company gets big off its grand idea, there's little to no chance of it having another big winner, so buying one is best (and its cheaper too, you know it's a good idea, and you don't have to spend so much R&D on it.

It makes some sense to sell out if you're building a product that will at best acquire a tiny sliver of the market, which almost all companies will. But there's at least a few AI companies, like Anthropic, that could potentially balloon towards becoming a Big Tech company. So it makes sense for them to not sell out for the time being.

Big companies have never built anything new. It goes back decades. before tech companies, it was giants like GE who grew through acquisition after acquisition and eventually imploded from the incompetence blob (which takes a long time to accumulate the damage). The same will happen to the current big tech companies in a few decades.

>you will be acquired.

You say this as if it's a coercive given, when you could just as easily say.. Nope, and continue to see how you compete with some agility. It might fail, but most of the big tech companies currently acquiring smaller companies themselves started small with acquisition offers being rejected along the way. Sure, there's selection bias at work there, but there are also many cases of smaller to mid-size companies that also said no to acquisition and still managed to find their successful niche.

Being acquired is not a given and neither is failure if you do compete in some way with the megacorps.

I see nothing about the current tech landscape that at all distinguishes it from previous landscapes in which smaller companies succeeded AND rejected acquisition.

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But is there grounds to say that as a conglomerate they pose a large harm to market health to merit a breakup? For example, few regulators want to break up Mondragon.

There's no value in Amazon burning money to 'compete' when there no clear endgame. Right now the competition seems to be who can burn a a hundred billion dollars the fastest.

Once a use case and platform has stabilized, they'll provide it via AWS, at which poiny the SME market will eat it up.

I like AWS overall.

(Though I'm pretty familiar with some of the concepts, I know some things to avoid (e.g., "push this button to set up a very expensive global enterprise scale observability platform of numerous complicated services, because you asked about a very simple turn-key syslog service"), and I'm expecting the occasional configuration headache (and, lately, configuration wizard bugs).)

For a new startup, I'd use AWS for all serving and hosting purposes by default, iff you have someone who can avoid pitfalls, and handle problems.

If you don't have such a technical person, maybe start off with managed Kubernetes service with high-level UI, at AWS or one of the other cloud providers, and try not to make too big a mess (which might slow you down, or take you down) before you can afford to hire specialists to make sure it keeps working for you.

I still like AWS all these years later. It’s trusted in the enterprise and you can empower people to do what they need to themselves with IAM. And it’s pretty reliable.

> AWS has now become one of the most hated tools

By whom? Certainly no one I work with. AWS has some sharp edges and frustrations but we couldn't do half of what we do without it.

This is a weird take. I don’t know any developers who hate AWS. It’s the dominant cloud provider for a reason.

Since when? It’s extremely popular

I don't think cloud computing is a hated "tool", it's effectively taken over running on-prem.

It's the same as saying buying electricity from a network is worse than having your own generators.

You say Jenkins is hated, but surely it's no more hated or worse than any other bigger player in the space like Teamcity or Bamboo.

huh how did Jenkins all of a sudden get into this discussion? And why the hate, it was king of CI for over a decade and for good reason.

> AWS has now become one of the most hated tools

News to me

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