your point is well-taken enough, but the idea that a sharp investor was investing in Yahoo or Myspace in 2006 is a bit silly. Myspace was bought out in 2005, and it had been dead for years before that. and I don't think I had gone to yahoo.com for any reason other than testing my internet connection anytime in the prior 10 years before that. also, investing in Google or Facebook back then would be enough to retire on, much less had you invested in a basket of tech-but-not-obviously-dead-tech stocks. from what I recall from that era, the one things I knew for sure at the time were (1) Google is gonna be around in 20 years, bigly and (2) Facebook might be DoA in terms of social media endgame, but operationally they are very strong and executing.
what I really push back on is the idea that there are magically going to be all sorts of entrants into the space that meaningfully compete with Anthropic or OpenAI in the near or even medium term. for as much as the reddit set continues to put their collective heads in the sand while screaming "there's no moat"... there is a moat, and one so prominent as to be self-evident. not once has an open-source model come even close to genuinely reaching frontier performance for anything other than cost, and cost is by definition the easiest thing to improve on-- just distill bigger model into smaller model: boom, cheaper!
>Myspace was bought out in 2005, and it had been dead for years before that.
Myspace's peak popularity (in terms of monthly unique pageviews) came in 2007. Yahoo was ahead of Google for several years, though I am struggling to find good data on the specifics there. Your understanding seems to be based in your own personal experience of those sites, which is fine, but I don't think it quite matches the big picture.
Your proposal that there won't be any new entrants is puzzling to me because, in the grand scheme of things, OpenAI and Anthropic ARE new entrants. The entire space is new. It feels like ChatGPT became public eons ago, but it hasn't even been 4 years. Imagine saying in 2008 that no photo-sharing site would ever surpass Flickr - it's been dominant for 4 years! Why would you go to something new when everyone's photos are already on there?
One absolutely enormous advantage new entrants have in the AI space is that they can start on third base. Anthropic had to spend billions and billions of dollars to get to Opus 4.6. A new entrant could distill its way into a model roughly on par with that far more cheaply, and spend its VC cash on things like marketing and price cutting rather than burning it on actually creating a good model. The existing players need to service mountains of debt and are locked into deals for compute based on outdated assumptions about efficiency. I'm not saying it would be EASY for a new entrant to waltz in, especially to the enterprise market. But it's not impossible especially on the consumer side: Meta was essentially a non-factor until Muse came out, and now most people think of Muse when they think of an AI agent (as opposed to Claude, which is just a chatbot in the public imagination, because that's what it was when it became popular).
i agree that they are, objectively, new entrants, but that does somewhat mischaracterize, in the same sense that calling Ford a new entrant into the car industry after they came out with the Model T. like... they are creating the market into which they are entering. ChatGPT galvanized this entire phenomenon.
i do agree that there is a good chance that one of these post- OpenAI/Anthropic competitors probably will get some sort of unanticipated foothold, if only because enough talent will drain out over time. what i push back on is the idea that being 90% as good as frontier models is actually good enough to matter in even the slightest. especially since we know that the "real" internal models are so much further advanced than what we get access to publicly.
i absolutely agree that it isn't impossible-- if the only thing stopping a new entrant is capital (as in: they have the trillion-dollar idea necessary to be competitive) that will absolutely never be a true impediment to a worthy competitor.
It's not even clear that the "frontier AI lab" is going to be the best, most profitable business model to evolve out of this tech. Especially if models are easy to distill, a new lab can start on 3rd base, and China open weights aren't far behind.
The winning business model may be 1 or 2 abstractions removed from "build a really good LLM model", and yet to be revealed in the marketplace.
Most people do not think of Muse as an the ai agent. Most think OpenAI or Claude. The people using Muse are using it as a facebook chatbot.
> Most people do not think of Muse as an the ai agent. Most think OpenAI or Claude. The people using Muse are using it as a facebook chatbot.
Yeah, I was with the case bring made, until that point. A very bizarre claim, especially given the questions around safety:
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/10/metas-muse...
I disagree, Yahoo was actually seen as a technological leader and, unlike Google that was purely a search engine in its early years, Yahoo was a full platform that seemed poised for a while to become a landing page for the internet.
When it comes to AI there simply isn't a moat - Anthropic would be my best guess out of the current entrants due to them trying to construct one via value-adding code assistance tools that might create enough friction to prevent customers from jumping ship but the models themselves are a commodity that depreciates extremely quickly. If you want to retain the frontier premium you need to constantly be improving due to the ease of distillation.
Your comment makes the timeline seem very different from the way I remember it. Yahoo was dominant much earlier than Google, and was one of a handful of big search engines. Google was a relative newcomer at the time, which had the benefit of being way better at search, which is why it eventually dominated the competition.
If open source models stay consistently <12 months behind the frontier, that shrinks the moat considerably; not for all use cases, but maybe enough to scupper profitability
I was sad on the day when my.yahoo.com shut down. It had a bunch of RSS feeds, and news, I have not found a good replacement for it.