First you clone the API of the winner, because you want to siphon users from its install-base and offer de-risked switch over cost.

Now that you’re winning, others start cloning your API to siphon your users.

Now that you’re losing, you start cloning the current winner, who is probably a clone of your clone.

Highly competitive markets tend to normalize, because lock-in is a cost you can’t charge and remain competitive. The customer holds power here, not the supplier.

Thats also why everyone is trying to build into the less competitive spaces, where they could potentially moat. Tooling, certs, specialized training data, etc

Our (western) economic model forces competing individual companies to be profitable quickly. China can ignore DeepSeek losing money, because they know developing DeepSeek will help China. Not every institution needs to be profitable.

yes, they want to win the same way they won more or less every other economic competition in the last 30 years, scale out, drop prices and asphyxiate the competition.

Yeah, it’s an interesting one. I think inertia and expectations at this point? I don’t think the big labs anticipated how low the model switching costs would be and how quickly their leads would be eroded (by each other and the upstarts)

They are developing their moats with the platform tooling around it right now though. Look at Anthropic with Routines and OpenAI with Agents. Drop that capability in to a business with loose controls and suddenly you have a very sticky product with high switching costs. Meanwhile if you stick with purely the ‘chat’ use cases, even Cowork and scheduled tasks, you maintain portability.

They are all racing to AGI. They aren't designing them to be interchangeable they just happen to be.

If you want other people to know whether you're being genuine or sarcastic, you'll have to put a bit more effort into your comments. Your comment just adds noise.