The problem is twofold. One, even a monopoly AI provider wouldn't have pricing power against its suppliers. Its suppliers are energy, semiconductors, and real estate. Semiconductors maybe they could get some leverage on but energy and real estate have plenty of other buyers. Two, there's still no evidence of a runaway scenario (ie a small lead turns into a big lead over time) and there's still no evidence that there's some resource that you can deny everyone else that they can't build your product also. You can't hoard energy, compute, memory, data, human talent, or customers.

The net effect is that the most likely scenario is if one big lab fails, they will likely all fail. Their revenues are all correlated.

To go to your dotcom comparison, the winner will be the ones picking through the assets that were written down by orders of magnitude and trying new products with the technology until one sticks to the wall. But I don't know if a dramatic crash is guaranteed either.

I suspect this is going to end up like most services provided e.g. cloud stuff, balkanized between a couple major players and an assortment of DIY or less popular options if you don't like those ecosystems, plus some UX/DX focused wrappers that use the big players under the hood.

I think that would be a pretty satisfactory outcome compared to one hypercompany consuming trillions of dollars of the world economy.

“Divide the world” sounds ominous. Here’s another scenario to consider:

Internet access is not really unlimited, but for many people with fiber at home, it effectively is and we pay a flat rate.

Perhaps by the end of next year, most programmers will stop thinking about metered access for AI? For many people, the cheaper models (about as good as today’s frontier models) will be good enough.

Which might sound good, but the downside is that it will also be easier to build an AI botnet without the users paying for it noticing. Particularly when people are running AI inference on their own hardware.

Or, like airlines, the ones that are left will have great technology but be not so great from a business and financial perspective. To me AI seems like a commodity service.

THe problem with analogies is that they are imperfect.

I would argue those who already rule the world, will continue to do so.

What happens to OAI and Anthropic? No idea, probs go bust. Google just has to offer a half-decent offering in the long run and have a cost-advantage and it'll eventually knock OAI and Anthropic out as firms figure out what combination of models they want to be best for their economics and generating returns. Enterprises trust google over OAI and Anthropic. A clear signal of this was the Apple deal.

Dont forget those sweet returns fellas! CEO's are hired to make the owners wealthier. That is not gone.