I am pretty sure the biggest thing in question is if OpenAI and Anthropic are as valuable as they say they are vs any other AI labs. I guess we will see, but I still feel it doesn’t take many ex-employees from them to build something that can wrestle them, and also it’s weird seeing other players that also have comparable AI models (Alphabet, Meta, whatever company owns Grok these days, …) do not get as much in value. There is also the “Can local models disrupt this?” question (and the Chinese labs), and there is also the question of hardware availability (will some player change this?).

I feel the projected value of both OpenAI and Anthropic requires that nothing changes in a space of technology where things seems to change a lot and reasonably suddenly.

No, no one believes that. Everyone can see that AI is going to change how many industries work completely. The parent is constructing a strawman argument "the reasoning is motivated and that motivation is nostalgia (or similar)".

Even Ed Zitron rarely talks about AI outside financials. I have no idea what OP is talking about.

I guess they mean as far as AI being this utopian cure all for the ills of the world that some might have us believe is coming, its BS?

Yes, quite a few people believe AI is a big scam and it’s not actually good for anything.

I know this might seem crazy to software developers who handed all their dev work over to Claude 6 months ago. But most people are not software developers.