> But these products are all drop in replacements for each other

For now. That doesn't really change the risk, that just means they are all hyper competitive right this moment, and so they are comparable. If one of them becomes king of the hill, nothing stops them from silently degrading or jacking prices.

The only shield is to not be dependent in the first place. That means keeping your skills sharp and being willing to pass on your knowledge to juniors, so they aren't dependent on these things.

Of course, many people are building their business on huge AI scaffolding. There's nothing they can do.

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conrs 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm curious - why for now? This stuff is practically commoditized. Trying to think of anything that ever successfully got back into proprietary land from there.

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zozbot234 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The thing is that AI is still more akin to a glorified autocomplete than something that can really supersede your skills. Proprietary model suppliers are constantly trying to obscure this basic underlying fact, without much success (much of the unpredictable shifts you see in proprietary AI behavior ultimately boils down to this); so it becomes far more crystal-clear when using open models that really are a pure commodity.

	▲	conrs 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		yeah, I think there's the marketing and then there's the actual true utility. AI isn't a better computer program. It's not going to be able to do everything you want autonomously. But, it's pretty good at some stuff!

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Capricorn2481 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It doesn't look commoditized to me, it looks subsidized. It looks like everyone is trying to be "the one" and running as competitively as possible until the others fail. Commoditized would imply these services are all going to mellow into a stable state and mostly compete on price. I don't think that's happening. These aren't paper clips, they are courting governments and trying to pull the ladder up behind them. That's why both Anthropic and OpenAI are preaching doomsday and trying to build a moat with regulations.

	▲	conrs 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fair. I have high hope for local inference, feel like right now it is simply cost prohibitive to get the hardware. It will be interesting to see what happens.