I think the big difference is that Google is free: everyone is using Google because it doesn’t cost anything and for a long time was the best search engine out there. I am sure that if Google would suddenly charge a few dollars per month for access, Bing market share would explode overnight, because it would become “good enough but cheaper”.

With the AI models, using a model that is “good enough but cheaper” is already an option.

I too am old. Google search is free, hard to replicate, and while there used to be lots of search engines, Google was (and arguably still is) miles ahead of all the others in terms of quality and performance.

A model is hard to train but it doesn't need to be hyper up to date / have a new version come out every day. Inference is cheap (it seems?) and quality is comparable. So it's unclear how expensive offerings could win over free alternatives.

I could be wrong of course. I don't have a crystal ball. I just don't think this is the same as Google.

Of course I could be entirely mistaken and there could emerge a single winner

In the first years, I remember no other search engine was close to Google quality. We all ditched AltaVista because Google was incredibly better. It would have been awful to switch back to any other options. We can already switch between the 3 big proprietary models without feeling too much differences, so it’s quite a different landscape.

I think windows has historical monopoly.

They bundled it with PC hw and the vast majority of apps only ever got published for windows, and this over decades (one would argue it’s still true).

The starting point for LLMs is very different. Who would publish today a software that only integrates with chatGPT? Only a small minority.

Thus I agree, I struggle to see how a monopoly can exist here. A GPU monopoly or duopoly though, perhaps.

It’ll be a bunch of tiny moats in that scenario. LLMs are way too generic, adaptable, flexible in how you use it to make a big most out of it.

> Software always gets monopoly simply by usage

Most software isn't made by monopolies. More directly, enterprise-software stocks are getting hammered because AI offers them competition.

It's more like saying AWS has a monopoly on virtual machine hosting.

(For those unaware, AWS doesn't have a VM monopoly, and the market dynamics seem similar)

>This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes

we don't, we have about 3 operating systems that have the decades of hardware and software compatibility that makes them widely usable. They're the most complex and complicated things we've built. LLMs are a few thousand lines of python hooked up to a power plant and graphics cards. This is the least defensible piece of software there ever has been.

Yes of course they will; the CEO of Anthropic makes that argument, very openly, all the time. But it will be hard to do, I think.