It's not just phones. Try asking ChatGPT/Gemini anything the hive mind in SV doesn't want you to ask. Try asking it anything the hive mind as decided has only one possible answer. It's only going to get worse

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jbstack 8 hours ago | parent [-]

At least with LLMs you have more options (Deepseek, Grok, offline models, etc.). It's still far from perfect, but it's not as bad as phones where you basically only have a choice of Android or iPhone if you don't want to have to live with major inconvenience (such as being unable to do online banking or pay for parking). It's also a lot easier to launch a competitor in the AI market: you just need capital. With phone OS's it's essentially impossible. The barriers to entry are too high.

	▲	fragmede 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> you just need capital The capital itself isn't going to do anything sitting in the bank. It's used to procure a team of PhDs, an team of SWEs, DevOps, business people, HR, marketing, access to a GPU supercomputer (renting a couple of 5090s off Vast.ai ain't gonna cut it). For, say, $50 million, you could get the blueprints to an Android phone and port your choice of Linux userland and get drivers working, and then do a run of 20,000, sell them for $1100. Compared to training GPT5, $50 million is cheap. If we use an estimate of $1 billion for the whole thing, making a Linux phone running a hypervisor with an Android VM to run banking apps seems not-impossible. (Based on AVF.)