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A comment on Anthropic IPO. Parent comment

Re:Anthropic IPO by simianwords on Thursday November 12, 2026 @08:24AM (#50466739)
When people want to argue that AI is a commodity, they confuse two concepts

1. switching costs

2. fungibility

I do agree that LLMs have low switching costs. But they are not fungible - each model is unique with different strengths and weaknesses.

I also disagree that they can increase switching costs by moving in application stack.

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Re:Anthropic IPO by camdenreslink on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:55AM (#50470384)
They are fungible in the sense that they can accomplish the same task up to a certain acceptable quality.

If I needed to implement a simple function that is well described, all LLMs (for the most part) are fungible. They will have almost identical implementations (sans variable names) and all be fit for purpose.

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