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.