However, I’m tempted to compare to GitHub: if I join a new company, I will ask to be included to their GitHub account without hesitation. I couldn’t possibly imagine they wouldn’t have one. What makes the cost of that subscription reasonable is not just GitHub’s fear a crowd with pitchforks showing to their office, by also the fact that a possible answer to my non-question might be “Oh, we actually use GitLab.”
If Anthropic is as good as they say, it seems fairly doable to use the service to build something comparable: poach a few disgruntled employees, leverage the promise to undercut a many-trillion-dollar company to be a many-billion dollar company to get investors excited.
I’m sure the founders of Anthropic will have more money than they could possibly spend in ten lifetimes, but I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be some competition. Maybe this time it’s different, but I can’t see how.
you have 2 labs at the forefront (Anthropic/OpenAI), Google closely behind, xAI/Meta/half a dozen chinese companies all within 6-12 months. There is plenty of competition and price of equally intelligent tokens rapidly drop whenever a new intelligence level is achieved.
Unless the leading company uses a model to nefariously take over or neutralize another company, I don't really see a monopoly happening in the next 3 years.
I was focusing on a theoretical dynamic analysis of competition (Would a monopoly make having a competitor easier or harder?) but you are right: practically, there are many players, and they are diverse enough in their values and interest to allow collusion.
We could be wrong: each of those could give birth to as many Basilisks (not sure I have a better name for those conscious, invisible, omni-present, self-serving monsters that so many people imagine will emerge) that coordinate and maintain collusion somehow, but classic economics (complementarity, competition, etc.) points at disruption and lowering costs.
Rent seeking isn't about whether the product has value or not, but about what's extracted in exchage for that value, and whether competition, lack of monopoly, lack of lock in, etc. keeps it realistic.
Rent-seeking of old was a ground rent, monies paid for the land without considering the building that was on it.
Residential rents today often have implied warrants because of modern law, so your landlord is essentially selling you a service at a particular location.
You can disable SIP and even disable immutable kernel text, load arbitrary drivers, enable/disable any feature, remove any system daemon, use any restricted entitlements. The entire security model of macOS can be toggled off (csrutil from recoveryOS).
Stopping/disabling a service should be a command, like it is on Windows or Linux. Not configured on a read-only volume bundled with other security guarantees.
It's pretty simple to keep these two things separate, like everywhere else in the present and history of the industry.
Rust is hard/simple. The rules aren't complex. The constructs aren't complex. But it's hard to write because the rules are very restrictive.
Rust is also much easier to read than write (for a reader who understands the rules).
It's optimising for exactly the things you want in systems programming:
Easier to read than the write.
Simple rules that are easy to understand but hard to follow, and that produce simple programs.
Compare that to C which is easy/complex. It's much easier to write than to read. It's easy to learn and write but produces code that's very complex. The rules are all by convention instead of part of the type system.
That's pretty out of context. Before that, they say this:
> The rules aren't complex. The constructs aren't complex.
So yes, once you understand it, you understand it, but they also specifically said it's not hard to get to the point of understanding it. If we're going to assume that any out-of-context quote is equivalent to the entirety of the content, I'll just cite you on this one:
Its pretty easy to learn the rules. Once you've done that you can watch a game and know roughly what is happening. But its still a hard game to master.
