Why does it feel like all tech companies are the same these days? It wasn’t always like this right?

Because collecting signals from the people that use these systems is extremely valuable. This kind of data is almost impossible to gather unless you own such a product. And those that do probably won't sell to the competition. So, it makes sense that everyone is in the me too phase.

Goog is even heavily subsidising this. Anthropic is likely doing it with their top tiers as well. Even the small ones @20$ most likely did in the beginning.

It's a new category of tool and they're all competing for it

All the tech companies have a lot of software developers working there and they always have a ton of projects around software development and deployment that they've released. It's been new that they've been _monetizing them_, but that pretty much has to be done for AI tooling because of inferencing costs....