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OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
11–20 of 171 posts
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#12Visa makes $20B a year in profit. OpenAI and every other large tech company in the space is burning through billions of dollars every year just to stay competitive. It is idiotic to crown a company as a "monopoly" in AI when the business case hasn't even been defined yet. Give it a decade or two then maybe we can have this conversation.
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#13Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Would be helpful to have some concrete examples of what it did and what OpenAI is trying to do. The point of the article sounds plausible, but doesn't really present any evidence to support it. Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has.
Idk why government can't even regulate variable pricing that Visa/MC charges...
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#14Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Would be helpful to have some concrete examples of what it did and what OpenAI is trying to do. The point of the article sounds plausible, but doesn't really present any evidence to support it. Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has.
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Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#15> What Visa did in response recently got it sued by the Justice Department, which accused Visa of using aggressive tactics with companies like CostcoCOST $956.14 (-0.29%) and AppleAAPL $258.99 (0.35%) to guarantee that a competitive payment network would not develop, The Wall Street Journal reported. I don't buy the reasoning as to how Visa built a moat. From the WSJ article linked in the article: >> Visa offered to…
> The thing with credit cards is that you can have more than one. I have a Visa and a Mastercard and when I shop at Costco I use Visa.
Well... yeah. No shit. Because you couldn't use the Mastercard if you wanted to. That's what this article is complaining about. And in their most recent quarter Costco posted a handy 80 billion in net sales, I'm betting those processing fees added up to a tidy sum for Visa, corroborated in the fact that they plunked down 150 million to keep it exclusive to them.
> I don't see this reason stopping someone wanting to compete as though if they can't get the Costco dollars, they have no product.
It's literally textbook pay for play. It's purchasing an advantage in an open market. Mastercard will receive no transaction fees from Costco this or any year unless this agreement is revisited, and not because people don't want to use Mastercards there, but because Visa paid Costco to not let them. How is that anything but anti-competitive?
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#16Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Would be helpful to have some concrete examples of what it did and what OpenAI is trying to do. The point of the article sounds plausible, but doesn't really present any evidence to support it. Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has.
> Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has.
I think this is misreading how literal the comparison is meant to be; Sherwood's running a bunch of "OpenAI is X" articles today. This is not about the massive duopoly which has been catastrophic for US payments, but about the way companies entrench themselves.
> Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly.
Those details are in the linked WSJ article; https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/visa-wanted-a-vast-empir...
> but doesn't really present any evidence to support it.
The main points of concern are mentioned; OpenAI is pushing for "AI regulation" that focusses on the nebulous "doomsday"/skynet scenarios, rather than any of the material harms of AI. The subtext of that is a straightforward "you should ban anyone else building AI because only we can do it safely".
Similarly, OpenAI demanding it's investors not fund competitors is pretty ridiculous and explicitly trying to establish a monopoly.
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#17Not much of a monopoly when they are being outcompeted by open source models done by companies with a fraction of OpenAIs resources. Sure - a government sanctioned monopoly might have been their fantasy but now it is getting obvious it is not the way things are going to go …
> by companies with a fraction of OpenAIs resources. Meta and Google are orders of magnitude greater than OpenAI and they're the only contenders that have challenged GPT models. > But what about Mistral et al? They are not even near GPT-4o. Good gpt-3.5-turbo alt tho.
You might be interested in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514633
In fairness, OpenAI has been leading benchmarks for the most part, but open source is never more than 3-6 months behind.
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
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Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#19> What Visa did in response recently got it sued by the Justice Department, which accused Visa of using aggressive tactics with companies like CostcoCOST $956.14 (-0.29%) and AppleAAPL $258.99 (0.35%) to guarantee that a competitive payment network would not develop, The Wall Street Journal reported. I don't buy the reasoning as to how Visa built a moat. From the WSJ article linked in the article: >> Visa offered to…
> thing with credit cards is that you can have more than one. I have a Visa and a Mastercard and when I shop at Costco I use Visa. I don't see this reason stopping someone wanting to compete as though if they can't get the Costco dollars, they have no product.
I'm sorry, are we really saying that it's acceptable for the market to begin preferring one completely compatible payment network vs another? This is clearly an undue influence in the market due to monopolistic power being used as leverage. No one should have to open an account with visa just to shop at a retailer. Anti competitive and anti consumer to the core.
> But that really has to do with ridiculous regulations and things like KYC, but we're not ready to have that conversation yet.
Ahhh, fearmongering about KYC. Know your customer is an obviously good regulation for banks to know the type of business they are partnering with for both risk assessment and anti fraud protections. So, what scams are you in favor of allowing by removing KYC regulations?
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#20> What Visa did in response recently got it sued by the Justice Department, which accused Visa of using aggressive tactics with companies like CostcoCOST $956.14 (-0.29%) and AppleAAPL $258.99 (0.35%) to guarantee that a competitive payment network would not develop, The Wall Street Journal reported. I don't buy the reasoning as to how Visa built a moat. From the WSJ article linked in the article: >> Visa offered to…
> The thing with credit cards is that you can have more than one. I have a Visa and a Mastercard and when I shop at Costco I use Visa. Well... yeah. No shit. Because you couldn't use the Mastercard if you wanted to. That's what this article is complaining about. And in their most recent quarter Costco posted a handy 80 billion in net sales, I'm betting those processing fees added up to a tidy sum for Visa, corroborat…
Is it any different from a movie theatre or restaurant selling only Pepsi products due to exclusive agreement?
Or Playstation paying for a game to be distributed only on their platform?
How about a sports team only allowing Reebok or Nike or Adidas or whatever?
Don't get me started on Netflix only movies!