It's not the AI technology itself that is being monopolized, it's the data necessary to train it.

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.

Specifically with regards to the data necessary to train, the AI companies have allowed the earth to be scorched (to say scorched earth tactic is to attribute intent, which I wish to avoid for my point), making clean training data harder to obtain. Essentially, what I do see as intended is the enclosure of an intellectual commons.

You don't need clean data to train, just "reasonable" data. General bulk data from the wider world isn't the difficult part. AFAIU task specific RL environments, custom annotated datasets, and access to the raw compute necessary to actually perform the training are the primary limiting factors. The latter in particular is no joke. Most companies won't be able to afford the pretraining for a frontier sized model. Even "small" models can run into the millions USD IIUC.

Data will be stolen/exfiltrated if it becomes that valuable

Will?

AI is simultaneously at the forefront of mathematics and unable to do accounting.

> AI is simultaneously at the forefront of mathematics and unable to do accounting.

It's almost as if arithmetic were the least important part of mathematics. :-)

Power, natural gas, gasoline, water, mobile contracts, railways, internet access are probably better analogies. They have tendencies to (local) monopolies but also a lot of precedent and knowledge on how to regulate and break them, how to introduce competition.

they broke up Ma Bell, but they've never done anything about the internet access. Mobile is an oligopoly.

The breakup of AT&T was the proximal cause of the Ronald Reagan / Robert Bork dismantling of the US antitrust apparatus.

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.

I don't think so. You can't practically buy electricity from halfway across the planet but you can buy tokens. There's no local infrastructure to monopolise.

> I don't think anyone serious believes this any more. The tech is thoroughly commoditized.

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.