> Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before?
The model owner can just withhold access and build all the businesses themselves.
Financial capital used to need labor capital. It doesn't anymore.
We're entering into scary territory. I would feel much better if this were all open source, but of course it isn't.
Why would the model owner do that? You still need some human input to operate the business, so it would be terribly impractical to try to run all the businesses. Better to sell the model to everyone else, since everyone will need it.
The only existential threat to the model owner is everyone being a model owner, and I suspect that's the main reason why all the world's memory supply is sitting in a warehouse, unused.
I think this risk is much lower in a world where there are lots of different model owners competing with each other, which is how it appears to be playing out.
New fields are always competitive. Eventually, if left to its own devices, a capitalist market will inevitably consolidate into cartels and monopolies. Governments better pay attention and possibly act before it's too late.
> Governments better pay attention and possibly act before it's too late.
Before its too late for what? For OpenAI and Claude to privatise their models and restrict (or massively jack up the prices) for their APIs?
The genie is already out of the bottle. The transformers paper was public. The US has OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Google and Meta all making foundation models. China has Deepseek. And Huggingface is awash with smaller models you can run at home. Training and running your own models is really easy.
Monopolistic rent seeking over this technology is - for now - more or less impossible. It would simply be too difficult & expensive for one player to gobble up all their competitors, across multiple continents. And if they tried, I'm sure investors will happily back a new company to fight back.