Well don’t forget we still have competition. Were anthropic to rent seek OpenAI would undercut them. Were OpenAI and anthropic to collude that would be illegal. For anthropic to capture the entire coding agent market and THEN rent seek, these days it’s never been easier to raise $1B and start a competing lab

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cedws 2 hours ago | parent [-]

In practice this doesn't work though, the Mastercard-Visa duopoly is an example, two competing forces doesn't create aggressive enough competition to benefit the consumer. The only hope we have is the Chinese models, but it will always be too expensive to run the full models for yourself.

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brokencode 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

New companies can enter this space. Google’s competing, though behind. Maybe Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, or Apple will come out with top notch models at some point.

There is no real barrier to a customer of Anthropic adopting a competing model in the future. All it takes is a big tech company deciding it’s worth it to train one.

On the other hand, Visa/Mastercard have a lot of lock-in due to consumers only wanting to get a card that’s accepted everywhere, and merchants not bothering to support a new type of card that no consumer has. There’s a major chicken and egg problem to overcome there.

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sghiassy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Chinese competition can always be banned. Example: Chinese electric car competition

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sho_hn 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's what OP was saying, I think, noting that running them locally won't be a solution.

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oblio an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Also Chinese smartphones. Huawei was about 12-18 months from becoming the biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world a few years ago. If it would have been allowed to sell its phones freely in the US I'm fairly sure Apple would have been closer to Nokia than to current day Apple.

	▲	aurareturn 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If Huawei was never banned from using TSMC, they'd likely have a real Nvidia competitor and may have surpassed Apple in mobile chip designs. They actually beat Apple A series to become the first phone to use the TSMC N7 node.