Practically, it doesn't matter like it didn't matter for Google that storage got many orders of magnitude cheaper. By the time training a novel LLM and serving it to a billion users is trivial in the way that providing 1GB of email storage is today there will be other moats. They'll have decades of user history and a monitization framework that will be hard to overcome.

Google is a viable competitor here.

Everyone else is missing part of the puzzle. They theoretically could compete but they're behind with no obvious way of catching up.

Amazon specifically is in a position similar to where they were with mobile. They put out a competing phone but with no clear advantage it flopped. They could put out their own LLM but they're late. They'd have to put out a product that is better enough to overcome consumer inertia. They have no real edge or advantage over OpenAI/Google to make that happen.

Theoretically they could back a competitor like Anthropic but what's the point? They look like an also ran these days and ultimately who wins doesn't affect Amazon's core businesses.

FB seems to have figured it out finally and their stock took a huge hit for the investment of infra. Also, despite being behind in sota models and huge human capital investments for research, I believe they are benefiting greatly from oai and the likes.

Every image/video/text post on a meta app is essentially subsidized by oai/gemini/anthropic as they are all losing money on inference. Meta is getting more engagement and ad sales through these subsidized genai image content posts.

Long term they need to catch up and training/inference costs need to drop enough such that each genai post costs less than net profit on the ads but they’re in a great position to bridge the gap.

The end of all of this is ad sales. Google and Meta are still the leaders of this. OpenAI needs a social engagement platform or it is only going to take a slice of Google.

How is Anthropic an also-ran when they lead the enterprise market?