> I can see that there are only 3 companies competing for the duopoly or monopoly realistically: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

I could see people saying this in 2022, but now? No chance.

Chinese models keep demonstrating that SOTA can be approximated for a fraction of the cost. The innovation out of these companies keep showing diminishing returns, with a greater emphasis on the tooling and application layer. Having the right workflow with the right data is more important than having the right model. We could freeze AI now, and I'd bet good money that the current state of things is good enough to - not be first - but competitive for the next few years.

Even if we do end up with a oligopoly situaiton, it'll be less like Microsoft in the 90s and more like Microsoft now where they just give out windows for free, have support for WSL and the focus is on cloud services rather than their OS.

How can this become a monopoly/duopoly? There is no moat, the Chinese providers will continue to hunt the market leader at 10% of the price, there is no network effect (OpenAI's Sora was a play in that direction and failed).

I'm constantly amazed how this AGI/monopoly narrative can be kept up so long in the West, it just doesn't make sense (unless the state creates said monopoly by forbidding competition).

> can see that there are only 3 companies competing for the duopoly or monopoly realistically: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google

Amazon and Microsoft have a seat at the table by virtue of their cloud businesses.

I think the performance of models is only one aspect. You have to take in account the cash flow, how much spending commitment the different actors have, debt, etc. OpenAI has taken some very risky commitments, of they don’t get the revenue to cover their expenses in the next few years their situation will be pretty bad

Yeah, no, i disagree. Frontier models were almost untouchable 6 month ago, but now i can get 90% of Opus 4.5 with any chineese model, or even with Mistral. The only thing i'm missing is the chain of thought that help me understand the "how" and "why" when AI fails at its task. For the "general purpose" AI, it's even worse, any free model i can run on my Intel Arc (yes, sorry, it was discounted an very cheap) i get like 80% of a frontier model, at virtually no cost, and i suppose Deepseek/Mistral are like 95% there.

Out of those 3, only Google seems to be in the position to reach that kind of profit levels due to distribution and advertising.

Claude is kicking ass in the niche of coding and processes.

1 trillion is a lot of money for something that's not differentiated and protected in a massive market.

Does it look like OpenAI has that in place?

Cuban thinks they don't, and won't.

https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-makes-five-year-plan...

LLMs are accelerants. They enable people to do patent and copyright infringement at a much larger scale. As we know from previous examples, if you break the law enough as a company eventually they have to let you keep doing it.

I don’t see how? You can train on something pending patent, but what are the benefits? If it gets patented you open yourself to get sued, I don’t see how AI works around that, the idea itself is still patented? I think I’m missing something for the argument to make sense. Or is the idea that if too many people use your patented idea you won’t be able to enforce it? That sounds risky to me

What a funny perspective - they didn’t side-step copyright, they blatantly infringed without financial consequence. The interesting “upside” is none of the generated works are protected by copyright. So it’s a bizarre conundrum which goes to show the complete disconnection between the concepts of the original intent - to protect authors and creators - with the warped capitalist mechanics of “rights holders” like Disney buying political influence for regulatory market capture.

Sugar coating the discussion is for children and dishonest ethical rationalization, in my view.

> these companies

I think the conclusion the market is rapidly and correctly reaching is we aren’t in an AI bubble, we’re in an OpenAI bubble.

Google, Amazon and Anthropic look likely to see ROI on their capital investments because they’ve made them halfway reluctantly. Microsoft is up in the air. Not sure what Meta is doing. And with the benefit of hindsight, OpenAI used capex as a marketing strategy with investors (while Sam Altman materially lied about his compensation and somehow looped Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, founder of The Information, into his racket).

He's stating the obvious, but perhaps it needed to be said.

Sometimes he is the stupidity and BS.