I think the endgame is a shift toward a platform of services that tightly bind users to a single LLM provider.

Right now, many small startups are essentially just thin wrappers around ChatGPT. Once it becomes clear which ideas and solutions gain real traction, providers like OpenAI/Anthropic can simply roll out those features natively removing any need for a third party.

In a sense, a lot of what happened with the mobile market. For example, there's no need for a QR scanner or document scanner app anymore, if your phone starts to offer it natively.

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kaptainscarlet 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Does anyone else remember how we used to have flash light apps all over the playstore and how they quickly varnished once the feature was implement natively?

	▲	kjkjadksj 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Almost everything in ios since ios1 has been a sort of in house copy of a jailbroken tweak. I feel like that is just how these huge companies actually innovate featuresets now. No one has agency to drive change from within, so they see what the community has built and is using and shamelessly copy it as it. Easier to sell to management that you should steal an already bright idea than to try and prove your own novel idea is worth pursuing.

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tern 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This seems correct to me. I'm unusually appreciative of vertical integration (life-long Apple user, etc.), and I can already feel the vendor lock-in tightening. I have no need for anything other than my ChatGPT subscription, and adding other tools appears to offer marginal gain at double the cost.

This type of bundling appears to be one of the strongest forces in the economy today, and I think comes about consistently due to a confluence of efficiencies of scale, coordination, and second-order effects of prestige (being able to hire and pay large numbers of outlier high performing employees, etc.)

I've learned not to bet against it, except in niche areas.