Is it better for society for promising startups to die on the open market, or get acquired by a monopoly? The third option -- taking down the established players -- appears increasingly unlikely.

Is there any evidence that this is the case ? For very big merger (like nvdia and Arm tried) sure, but I can't think of a single time regulator stop a big player from buying a start up.

What I know is that a lot of deals aren't even being considered that once were, and antitrust is a huge factor in that consideration.

If anything the current system is beyond redemption and should probably be nationalized for the betterment of society. Government investment in technology brought us the transistor and internet, the two things that enabled any of this to exist and it was massively subsidized for the betterment of the public.

Maybe we should follow that model again.

I think this is a problem for Google. Most users aren't going to do that unless they're told it's possible. 99% of users are working to a mental model of AI that they learned when they first encountered ChatGPT - the idea that AI is a separate app, that they can talk to and prompt to get outputs, and that's it. They're probably starting to learn that they can select models, and use different modes, but the idea of connecting to other apps isn't something they've grokked yet (and they won't until it's very obvious).

What people see as the featureset of AI is what OpenAI is delivering, not Google. Google are going to struggle to leverage their position as custodians of everyone's data if they can't get users to break out of that way of thinking. And honestly, right now, Google are delivering lots of disparate AI interfaces (Gemini, Opal, Nano Banana, etc) which isn't really teaching users that it's all just facets of the same system.

Google is telling this in about a hundred different popups and inline hints when you use any of its products