'Winner take all' doesn't mean convincing others to buy your product. If others have something to buy your product with, you've not taken all, fundamentally.
'Winner take all' means having the most powerful army. The assumption is that once AI crosses a certain threshold then there won't be anything the rest of us can do to stop the machine of whomever gets there first, so they will truly be able to take all. This is why the AI labs sometimes talk about the risk of human destruction.
But I am not sure you are right that it is strong enough to secure all. I search daily, but cannot remember the last time I used Google. And I'm not alone. Google's stock price recently took a nosedive because investors have grown quite worried about the competition. Without an army stopping them, there will always be someone else ready to try to outdo you.
Google shares dipped because AI shares dipped, not because their core business at risk. Google is in a _very_ strong position to capitalize on AI. Better than almost any other Big Tech company.
With AI, it looks to me like competition is much tighter, with no company having fundamentally superior technology or monetization plan. So a winner-take-all scenario is much less likely.
Maybe you mean that you could see the employees of those companies staging a coup to seize the army for themselves? That's certainly possible. They'd be in a good position to do so. Predicting the future is impossible, but if you want to be on the "right side" of that future army, owning its foundation today is still a reasonable bet.
Are you saying that winner-take-all markets are incompatible with capitalism? I'm confused
In reality the people would likely revolt by no longer recognizing private ownership of capital if that were to occur, but technically they don't have to. If they truly believe in capitalism they can continue to uphold the right for that private entity to own all the capital.
For the sake of discussion, if we entertain your thought, that means capitalism also doesn't exist beyond a thought experiment, which questions why it was brought into this discussion? Whether or not a winner-take-all-future is compatible with that thought experiment with no actual grounding really doesn't matter, does it?
Still, if you've ever actually dealt with a monopoly, you must surely understand the difference between that and an actual competitive market right?
Yeah, I know. We see you do that below.
> You should really try working in cloud.
I do. Yet I don't need to negotiate with a police force to protect it, so clearly there isn't a free market. But even if you want to pervert what a free market is by cherrypicking some things you like from it while ignoring everything else, I still don't see how you would ever consider the cloud to be free. It is marred by things like copyright and patents that make free exchange unrealistic.
> Our customers churn all the time because they have meaningful choice, and our margins reflect that
Is this humorous story intended to be an arbitrary tangent or something related to the rest of the discussion? The best interpretation I can come up with is that you are trying to use this story to explain that your cloud activities exist in a market, which is no doubt true, but you haven't given anything to suggest it is within a free market. Even non-free markets need to have choice. You cannot have a market at all, neither free nor non-free, if there is no choice. But there is more to markets than actors being able to choose. People having choice was present in societies even before the idea of a market was invented.
I don't think anyone serious believes this any more. The tech is thoroughly commoditized. There are a lot of plays to be made, like OpenAI cornering memory, or spending heavily on unique data for RL, if you can stop distilling, but there is no proprietary core IP at all.
There is no way to monopolize a technology this big. It would be like monopolizing literacy.
More specifically: when everything you could previously have earned money with is subsumed by AI, the "frontier" of profitable knowledge exists solely with the highest concentration of capital. Because that's where the highest amount of compute and consequently valuable data is.
Already now the idea of the tech being "commoditized" is true only if you exclusively look at the bubble of rich countries. AI-worthy compute is prohibitively expensive otherwise for individuals.
It's almost as if arithmetic were the least important part of mathematics. :-)
Here's the thing: we could bring it back. It had a good 50 year run, it could have another. Lina Khan was working on it, you probably saw the flak. This was on the ballot in 2024 and it will be again in 2028.
The latter doesn't imply the former. In other words it doesn't matter what the reality is, it matters what the excuses for sinking money down the hole are.
> There is no way to monopolize a technology this big. It would be like monopolizing literacy.
Again, I don't know if literacy is monopolized or not, that's a separate and quite long conversation, but whatever the case is, it doesn't mean anything wrt AI because GPUs and RAM are already monopolized and successful market scalping requires monopolization.
The bubble is simply an extraction mechanism, the conditions for it are present now, as are the will and power available to those who can do it and benefit from it. How long it's going to continue is a question with many unknowns but the conditions for it can be maintained for at least another 3 to 7 years.
If, and it is a big "if", someone were to become "the gods of AI", they get to perform a "pivotal act", i.e. take over the world. And if they do it wrong, end the world.
From the public statements, I get the impression that Zuckerberg is saying words solely to give positive vibes and does't actually believe any of that; that Musk might believe all of that but has only given as much cursory thought to it as one might get from reading a Wikipedia plot summary of Colossus: The Forbin Project, all The Culture novels, and an elevator pitch (~30 seconds or so) with Yudkowsky in 2013; others have certainly painted Altman in similar light; which leaves Amodei as a solid "C-" in the sense that while Anthropic still isn't taking this even close to seriously enough, he hasn't overtly said or done things that implicitly or explicitly show he thinks it's just fairy tales to get nerds interested in working for him.
I guess this is the big gamble, the idea that if you just spend enough money as fast as you can you can become the gods of AI forever and can just charge whatever you want for your magic beans.
But what is the moat? If in reality these things become commodities and just compete with each other to spit out cheap tokens then there's no way the margins are there.