I'm too young to have experienced this, but I'm sure others here aren't.
During the early days of tech, was there prevailing wisdom that software companies would never be able to compete with hardware companies because the hardware companies would always be able to copy them and ship the software with the hardware?
Because I think it's basically the analogous situation. People assume that the foundation model providers have some massive advantage over the people building on top of them, but I don't really see any evidence for this.
Does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked... count? (Edit: Missed I wasn't the first to post this in a sibling.)
Claude Code and Gemini-CLI are able to offer much more value compared to startups (like Cursor) that need to pay for model access, largely due to the immense costs involved.