This is distinctly different than the dot com bubble were people actually were euphoric about the future unfolding before their eyes.

Which is a topic of intense discussion in economics over the last few hundred years, BTW, and the discussion here so far has shockingly few references to those.

If that were actually true, how come we can't predict what the next Star Wars universe will be?

Same for pop songs etc. If it were actually about objective qualities of the creation, and not just luck, the next winners of the lottery would be apparent even before they hit the theaters.

There is null inherent quality in the Star Wars universe causing the billion dollar revenue. If George Lucas wouldn't have been there at the right spot at the right time, the dominant IP would simply have been something different.

If you have kids, you can directly observer what actually happens: The IP owners dump huge amounts of money into merch and product placements everywhere, resulting in them getting in contact with the franchise before they are out of their diapers. My kids came home from daycare roleplaying lightsaber fights without any previous contact with the franchise at our home. The trick is implanting the meme (in the original meaning of the word) into kids' brains before another meme can nest in there.

And apparently OpenAI and Anthropic think so, too - why else would they try so hard to ban them instead of outcompeting them?

People can hate on AI e.g. because they see it as a symbol of inequality and billionaires deciding important things over our heads and also actively use it.

In addition to the points of sibling comments, their respective starting posititions were drastically different: West Germany got the marshal plan, which benefitted their economy, the East had to pay reparations to the USSR, which meant whole factories, trains, even railroad tracks, all in all amounting to about a third of industrial capacity, were transferred to the USSR.

And the fact that the open-weight as well as cheaper tier 2 offers exist both place a ceiling on the prices the SOTA companies can demand - and as far as we know current prices don't even fully pay for inference alone already, at least not for OpenAI.

ARR is not a moat at all, because the revenue of OpenAI is not preventing Alibaba, z.ai and so on from generating revenue as well. The opposite is true, actually, because the first mover prepared the market (e.g. user education about application possibilities, creating the willingness to pay for the service in the first place) for the second movers.

People here write about switching from Claude to Codex mid-workday - that is the absolute opposite of a moat.

The only companies that have a chance of not losing everything in this market are those with established non-AI revenue streams, like Google or Alibaba, or those focusing on profitability in niche markets instead of participating in the SOTA death race.

I'm constantly amazed how this AGI/monopoly narrative can be kept up so long in the West, it just doesn't make sense (unless the state creates said monopoly by forbidding competition).

(That hamster-microwave thing is a disinfo campaign from manufacuturers to limit liability of corporations, BTW, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...)

I built and maintain a static site for a company, and it's just wonderful. It opens instantly (which the search engines like), rebuilding and deploying is trivial, I am not forced to update every week because the JS framework has a new vuln.(There are a few dynamic, JS-based parts that load dynamically and fail gracefully.)

The fact that you want to study economic processes because you want to e.g. better the live of the poor half of society does not mean you can't apply scientific principles. But the results will not necessarily be applicable for those who think a rising tide lifts all boats and therefore want to develop the economy in the interest of the upper class.

In fact I'd be suspicious if people claim to be unbiased in any field that even remotely has something to do with humans or society - it usually just means they either hide their interests, or aren't aware of their biases.