https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...

In the former example, there's far more pressure on the smaller companies, which is why in such a regime people expect more consistent quality from the big guys, and the smaller guys are often boutique in some way (=offering something unique in their service/product in order to be able to compete). Small guys have a hard time standing up to big guys.

On the other hand, in a regime where no one becomes that huge, like the latter example, there's still pressure, but the competition is fair, just like if all the companies were similarly big (except that you can't have that many big companies in a single industry, by proportion definitions).

Realizing this drove home why inconsistent antitrust enforcement appears to produce bad results. Because it leaves us in the state of the former example. It's also unfortunately the intermediate state of getting serious with antitrust enforcement.

> Anyone who thinks AI is good with writing code that is hard to write for the operator, not due to lack of basic software engineering know how but complexity of the domain, either has access to models beyond what is available to the public or is completely lost.

> It’s hard to collect enough data using invasive methods. Few people want a chip in their brain! But non-invasive methods are getting much better. The hardware is improving and getting cheaper, though I apologize for being vague about the particularities of our hardware.

If enough people/companies are on the bandwagon, you're afraid to push back and be the crazy one, potentially losing money. So you roll with it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49038270

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Today you can consider that "just business", and therefore "part of competing", but the were laws with the intention of allowing/disallowing types of tactics. E.g., you can't compete by leveraging your volume (see attached link), so you have to focus on making your service good.

The assumption made by a these people is that if there are so majy companies getting that big, there must be general disrespect of these laws. And correlating with the undisputed fact that antitrust enforcement did change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson%E2%80%93Patman_Act?wp...

But at this point we do expect that open weights _hosted_ options become feasible for the tasks they're using the frontier models for. And because of the lack of "legal monopoly" (intellectual property of whatever kind), they're way cheaper, not mention more flexible.

The launch of the tinker platform from Thinking Machines is an example of the "more flexibility" part that people want (and they chose to make their model open weights, maybe because this is the angle they want to push).

At this point I think it's realistic enough that the ball is in OpenAI / Anthropic's court to figure out how to respond to this threat to their business model.

That said, I think it's concerning that there are apparently only a couple of providers of hosted open weights inference, due to the complexities of doing so (per Dax from OpenCode's tweets).