They bundled it with PC hw and the vast majority of apps only ever got published for windows, and this over decades (one would argue it’s still true).
The starting point for LLMs is very different. Who would publish today a software that only integrates with chatGPT? Only a small minority.
Thus I agree, I struggle to see how a monopoly can exist here. A GPU monopoly or duopoly though, perhaps.
Most software isn't made by monopolies. More directly, enterprise-software stocks are getting hammered because AI offers them competition.
(For those unaware, AWS doesn't have a VM monopoly, and the market dynamics seem similar)
we don't, we have about 3 operating systems that have the decades of hardware and software compatibility that makes them widely usable. They're the most complex and complicated things we've built. LLMs are a few thousand lines of python hooked up to a power plant and graphics cards. This is the least defensible piece of software there ever has been.
Software always gets monopoly simply by usage. Every time a model gets used by esoteric use cases, it gets more training data (that a decentralized open weight model doesn't get) and it starts developing its moat.