Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

sherwood.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 171 posts

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#51

Post by jpcom »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #6

Doesn'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.

are you allergic to doing your own research like everyone else on hacker news? someone took the time to write a thought provoking article and all i see is critical reception.

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#53

Post by fragmede »

behnamoh wrote: post #9
chvid wrote: post #2

Not 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.

Claude by Anthropic outperforms OpenAI and Meta's models on several benchmarks and for the coding I do, and Anthropic is only 500-1000 people according to Crunch base

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#54

Post by delusional »

mdasen wrote: post #44
insane_dreamer wrote: post #6

Doesn'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.

Yea, I don't want to defend Visa, but a lot of their dominance came from network effects. Merchants want to accept Visa because it's what people have in their wallet. Customers want Visa because it's what merchants accept. That cycle keeps reinforcing itself. That's not to say that Visa hasn't worked toward favorable regulations, but the biggest problem with alternative payment networks (to Visa/MC/Discover/AMEX) is…

> Yea, I don't want to defend Visa, but a lot of their dominance came from network effects.

I think it's worth noting that VISA is also really doing a pretty good job. Like the cards work. Here in Europe they seem eager to adopt emerging technology and are willing to invest to maintain their dominance.

There's a ton of not so consumer friendly backroom deals with kickbacks for the banks and stuff, but the core product is roughly what consumers desire. A card that works almost 100% of the time without any difficulty. While simultaneously implementing and adopting whatever weird regulations get passed into law.

They are, in my opinion, doing a decent job.

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#55

Post by em500 »

lesuorac wrote: post #46
mdasen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I don't want to defend Visa, but a lot of their dominance came from network effects. Merchants want to accept Visa because it's what people have in their wallet. Customers want Visa because it's what merchants accept. That cycle keeps reinforcing itself. That's not to say that Visa hasn't worked toward favorable regulations, but the biggest problem with alternative payment networks (to Visa/MC/Discover/AMEX) is…

> but the biggest problem with alternative payment networks (to Visa/MC/Discover/AMEX) is that most retailers don't take them Who? I thought it was just like Costco that didn't take Discover/Amex/MC due to Visa contract. Aren't all the credit card terminals pretty much from 3p vendors who support everything including Apple Pay + Square + etc?

In most of Europe and several large Asian cities I visited, AMEX and Discover acceptance is far lower than Visa/MC (which charge lower fees to merchants).

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#57

Post by bdangubic »

dangerwill wrote: post #37
bko wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one should have to open an account with visa just to shop at a retailer. You know you have to pay just to enter Costco right? What's the difference if they want to force customers to use cash or Visa. Do you feel the same way about businesses that reject Discover? I really don't understand the outrage. > Ahhh, fearmongering about KYC. Know your customer is an obviously good regulation for banks to know the type…

> What's the difference if they want to force customers to use cash or Visa. I'll leave the cash option aside because the provider of cash is the US treasury. But yes, I do think it is wrong for a merchant to only allow mastercard or visa or discover. I understand merchants not taking Amex because their fees are significantly higher on the merchant side, but discover, mastercard, and visa are all similar for the merc…

I don’t understand this line of argument at all… Costco has competitors, you do NOT have to go to Costco. I choose not to go to many places because I disagree with their business practices or politics or whatever I feel like - it is my right. I do not understand this at all - especially in America. You don’t want my MasterCard or Discover or WhateverNewPaymentThingy? Great, imma head over to XYZ and spend my money there. Going to Costco (or any other business) and saying “you must accept XYZQ form of payment or else…” feels China-ish at best. And excusing Amex - why is that?! Fees alone? So we’d be cool if Visa just said “whatever you have to pay MC/Discover we’ll do it for one penny less”? At Costco’s scale that’d still be a boatload of money

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#58

Post by sokoloff »

jpcom wrote: post #51
insane_dreamer wrote: post #6

Doesn'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.

are you allergic to doing your own research like everyone else on hacker news? someone took the time to write a thought provoking article and all i see is critical reception.

When an article provokes thoughts with assertions that OpenAI has a meaningful monopoly on AI to maintain, sometimes those thoughts are “that article is just wrong.”

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#59

Post by mining »

naniwaduni wrote: post #32
ADeerAppeared wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

> 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 ... a useful piece of information with which to update our credulity of the narrative these articles are trying to present.

https://sherwood.news/tech/what-companys-past-reveals-the-fu... provides more context as to what the articles are trying to achieve.

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#60

Post by messe »

em500 wrote: post #55
lesuorac wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the biggest problem with alternative payment networks (to Visa/MC/Discover/AMEX) is that most retailers don't take them Who? I thought it was just like Costco that didn't take Discover/Amex/MC due to Visa contract. Aren't all the credit card terminals pretty much from 3p vendors who support everything including Apple Pay + Square + etc?

In most of Europe and several large Asian cities I visited, AMEX and Discover acceptance is far lower than Visa/MC (which charge lower fees to merchants).

AMEX/Discover is virtually unknown in most of Europe.

Outside of US-defaultism, why in the world would anyone expect it to be accepted here?

Post reply on HN