Like with databases? There are none of those freely available now that Oracle won right?

Snark only works when you've got a valid point.

One person can write sqllite. You can iterate up to bigger opensource DBs like postgre.

One person cannot create a modern LLM model unless they have 10s of millions of dollars to burn on compute.

LLMs are a fundamental shift from what was achievable in software and OSS, and we're basically living off scraps from the big players releasing their old models. They're already trying to create regulatory moats too.

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kasey_junk 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Oracle is far and away better than any of the open source databases. For a long time it wasn’t particularly close.

Db didn’t get parity with Oracle, they got good enough that you have to justify spending for Oracle and incurring the down sides of its company’s model.

Similarly, no db that competes with Oracle was written by one person, they were and are funded mostly by private companies and foundations.

There is a future where open weight models are good enough and the foundation labs are the truly luxury tier for a small subset of the user base.

That’s before talking about something like productivity software which Google _gives away_ while it’s a main business of Microsoft.

Blindly saying that there is only a future where the foundation llms capture all of the business is hyperbolic and ignores history. The llms look more db shaped to me than they look like car shares. Those truly are network effect dominated.

	▲	mattmanser 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You mean the history where MS captured the OS, Applle/Google the phone, Google capture the entire search market for 20 years, Facebook the social web, Amazon shopping, NVidia/AMD, Netflix, Spotify, I could go on and on and on. Most things in tech settle into monopolies or duopolies. LLMs are more akin to the search market than the database market. They need to be updated constantly. Selectively picking out the one technology that's basically no-one's primary business is an odd way to try and convince me. It must be over 20 years now since any large company consider a DB to be a significant product. Open source winners like Linux and MySql/Postgre are the oddity, not the norm.