Describing providing a highly valuable service for money as `rent seeking` is pretty wild.

It could be, formally, if they have a monopoly.

However, I’m tempted to compare to GitHub: if I join a new company, I will ask to be included to their GitHub account without hesitation. I couldn’t possibly imagine they wouldn’t have one. What makes the cost of that subscription reasonable is not just GitHub’s fear a crowd with pitchforks showing to their office, by also the fact that a possible answer to my non-question might be “Oh, we actually use GitLab.”

If Anthropic is as good as they say, it seems fairly doable to use the service to build something comparable: poach a few disgruntled employees, leverage the promise to undercut a many-trillion-dollar company to be a many-billion dollar company to get investors excited.

I’m sure the founders of Anthropic will have more money than they could possibly spend in ten lifetimes, but I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be some competition. Maybe this time it’s different, but I can’t see how.

	▲	johnsimer 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> It could be, formally, if they have a monopoly. you have 2 labs at the forefront (Anthropic/OpenAI), Google closely behind, xAI/Meta/half a dozen chinese companies all within 6-12 months. There is plenty of competition and price of equally intelligent tokens rapidly drop whenever a new intelligence level is achieved. Unless the leading company uses a model to nefariously take over or neutralize another company, I don't really see a monopoly happening in the next 3 years.

▲

1attice 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My housing is pretty valuable. I pay rent. Which timeline are you in?

	▲	kaashif an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Rent seeking refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
	▲	bonsai_spool an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Actually you're saying similar things: Rent-seeking of old was a ground rent, monies paid for the land without considering the building that was on it. Residential rents today often have implied warrants because of modern law, so your landlord is essentially selling you a service at a particular location.
	▲	mhluongo 33 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Two different "rent"s.