YouTube is an optimistic example.

The bandwidth costs made it deeply loss making for a long time despite having loads of engagement and ad revenue. However over time they became more cost efficient at sending video over the internet and became profitable.

This strategy obviously doesn't always work, with WeWork being the canonical example. But it's not guaranteed to fail either.

YouTube did not have competitors and certainly not open source competitors.

This is a bit before my time but I remember a bunch of competitors to YouTube. They just all sucked.

I was there when YouTube became a thing, and I was running a music video-hosting website that I had built myself (on top of phpBB, even). We were encoding videos in Windows Media and RealPlayer formats.

There were LOTS of funded competitors to YouTube between 2006 and 2009, including Viddler (who paid Gary Vaynerchuk a small fortune to host his WineLibraryTV show there exclusively), DailyMotion (which is still alive today, although no longer a threatening contender), etc.

In 2009 I had a coaching business and was buying marketing courses and software which would deploy your videos across 40+ different video websites (including Google Video which was a separate thing until they acquired YouTube and merged those), and YouTube wasn't yet amounting to 50% of our video traffic.

I think you might be mistaken with the bold statement above.

YouTube's network effect creating a winner-take-most was recognized, pitched, and valued from the very start.

The capabilities of LLMs are impressive, but none of them have published an idea I consider to have the same potential for a trillion $ monopoly that the current hype looks like.

There are far more similarities with the dot-com hype.

No critical first mover advantage in sight. All parts are replaceable for the cheapest variant with little to no down side to users.

They bought youtube for 1.65 billion which is pennies on the dollar compared to what it is worth today.

Technically true, though in fairness it is unlikely the original owners would have gotten YouTube to where it is today. On the other hand there are companies who didn’t recognise they were nothing more than passing fads, refused buyouts, and crumbled.

The monopoly is that no human can ever create anything again without AI. It’s the same psycho trap we put women in, where a vast majority of them will never feel comfortable without makeup.

You could have asked any one of the dozen available LLMs to review this comment.

Most of them would have responded by explaining what a monopoly is, and why this reply makes little sense.

You don't have a monopoly on the word monopoly. I can use it in another sentence if you like, but I won't spell it out for you.

It wasn't obvious at the time YouTube would have a network effect though. It was very dependent on coming up with a great recommendation algorithm, along with monetization and revenue sharing. At the time, YouTube didn't have anything like that, iirc.

Even the basic front page of youtube was of immediate and obvious value to a creator, and would increase disproportionately in value the more people were on YouTube. The same goes for Amazon, and the same goes for Facebook.

All the LLM providers are - extremely useful - tools. Currently I can only see the 'non-monopoly' proportional improvement when their userbase grows from 100 to 1000.

But I might be wrong, and I wouldn't be surprised if in hindsight it will be obvious what the real disproportionate advantages there were to be found.