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 2 hours 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.

	▲	bertil an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Precisely. I was focusing on a theoretical dynamic analysis of competition (Would a monopoly make having a competitor easier or harder?) but you are right: practically, there are many players, and they are diverse enough in their values and interest to allow collusion. We could be wrong: each of those could give birth to as many Basilisks (not sure I have a better name for those conscious, invisible, omni-present, self-serving monsters that so many people imagine will emerge) that coordinate and maintain collusion somehow, but classic economics (complementarity, competition, etc.) points at disruption and lowering costs.