upvote
New companies can enter this space. Google’s competing, though behind. Maybe Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, or Apple will come out with top notch models at some point.

There is no real barrier to a customer of Anthropic adopting a competing model in the future. All it takes is a big tech company deciding it’s worth it to train one.

On the other hand, Visa/Mastercard have a lot of lock-in due to consumers only wanting to get a card that’s accepted everywhere, and merchants not bothering to support a new type of card that no consumer has. There’s a major chicken and egg problem to overcome there.

reply
Chinese competition can always be banned. Example: Chinese electric car competition
reply
That's what OP was saying, I think, noting that running them locally won't be a solution.
reply
Also Chinese smartphones. Huawei was about 12-18 months from becoming the biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world a few years ago. If it would have been allowed to sell its phones freely in the US I'm fairly sure Apple would have been closer to Nokia than to current day Apple.
reply
If Huawei was never banned from using TSMC, they'd likely have a real Nvidia competitor and may have surpassed Apple in mobile chip designs.

They actually beat Apple A series to become the first phone to use the TSMC N7 node.

reply