Earlier quoted context omitted.
I alluded to what you say in the last paragraph: the average user isn't going to play with open source models, but the existence of the open source AI ecosystem will enable more competitors. There's not going to just be one AI company. There will be thousands and thousands, each addressing different use cases and market niches. In a world where OpenAI has a powerful technological moat, all of these companies would en…
I agree OpenAI won't and can't have anywhere near a monopoly, excluding very unlikely legal shenanigans. The field is too approachable, and ultimately, to pinch into their market one doesn't need GPT-4 level performance. Besides, apparently OpenAI can't scale compute fast enough, so users will end up by default requiring other providers. There's a very good chance of OpenAI/Microsoft being major players though IMHO.…
That being said, Linux and open source have had a gigantic effect on the market. This hasn't been by shipping products directly to consumers but by enabling a ton of startups to get there faster and cheaper. OSS enables a ton of innovation and consumers benefit from that.
I'm arguing that the same thing is going to happen in AI. That's all. AI will get faster, better, and cheaper, and the basic functionality will get commoditized. That will lead to more competition and more variation and make it hard for people like OpenAI to have a monopoly.
I'm sure OpenAI will still exist. They might stay a dominant player. I just don't see a world where they "own the tech" and get to be "the only AI" and charge rent to the entire industry because nothing works without their API. That's a fantasy... unless they can legislate it into existence, which is what I think they're trying to do.
On integrations: what happens when everyone uses AI? One of the most exciting possibilities I see for this technology is to entirely toss out the persnickety concept of the API in favor of LLMs talking to LLMs. Making software interoperate in the conventional way frankly sucks. It's a terrible slog through mud. Imagine if I could just say "hey app I just wrote, meet GitHub! GitHub, please explain to my app what you can do and how to access your capabilities... Now tell GitHub to... now tell other app on my machine to... now tell Amazon to..."
We are going to look back at how we did software interoperability the way we look at programming mainframes with punched cards.