I don't understand where the unbeatable edge is supposed to come from here. Don't we already have this in the form of agents using tools? Right now it's CLI but it's not difficult to imagine extending that to a GUI coupled with OCR and image recognition in a way that generalizes.

So suppose ACo attempts to subsume Spotify or Photoshop or whatever. So they ... build their own competing platform internally? That's a lot of work. And now they what, attempt to drive users to it by virtue of it being a first party offering? Okay sure that's just your basic anticompetitive abuse of monopoly I guess. MS got in trouble for that but whatever let's assume that happens.

So now lots of ACo users are using a Photoshop competitor behind the scenes. I guess they purchased a subscription addon for that? And I guess ACo has the home team advantage here (anticompetitive and illegal ofc) but other than that why can't Photoshop compete? It just seems like business as usual to me. What am I missing?

If ACo sells widgets and I also sell widgets, assuming I can get attention from consumers and offer a compelling set of features for a competitive price why can't I get customers exactly? ACo's AI will be able to make use of either widget solution just fine assuming ACo doesn't intentionally sabotage me.

I think the more likely issue is that at some point the cost of building software falls far enough that it ceases to be a viable product category. You just ask an agent for a one off solution and it hands it to you.

Projecting out even farther, eventually the agents get good enough that you don't need to ask for software tools in the first place. You request X, the agent realizes that it needs a tool for that, builds the one off tool, uses it, returns X to you, and the ephemeral purpose built tool gets disposed of as part of the the session history. All of this without the end user ever realizing that a tool to do X was authored to begin with.

So I guess I agree with your end outcome but disagree about the mechanics and consequences of it.

> Open models can't compete

They can though. There's a gap, sure, but this isn't black and white. Plenty of open models are quite useful for a particular task right now.