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
#2Not 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 …
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#3There is no way in which the little stock price boxes helped me understand or appreciate this article
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#4> 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 pay Costco $150 million. One condition of the deal: Costco would not do a credit-card deal with a bank that had its own network, according to the people familiar with the matter and the court filings. That shut out Chase. Visa also offered Costco an exclusive discount on the interchange fees the store pays when someone makes purchases with Visa credit cards.
So basically Visa offered Costco a discount if it allowed their cards exclusively. 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. 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.
That's not to say that Visa doesn't use lobbying and legal system to erect barriers to entry. But that really has to do with ridiculous regulations and things like KYC, but we're not ready to have that conversation yet.
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#5There is no way in which the little stock price boxes helped me understand or appreciate this article
The news source is owned by Robinhood. The stock boxes are to get you into the product buying stock.
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#6Doesn'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.
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#7Not 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 …
And it's less likely after the election. Trump pledged to repeal Biden's 2023 executive order on AI. He put out a very different executive order in 2019 that sought to reduce barriers. He is an enthusiastic deregulator compared to the current chief. That helped more than a little to get Andreessen, Musk, etc., to climb on the bandwagon. It can all be reversed at the wave of a very transactional presidential hand, but the sounds coming from the incoming administration are more favorable to open AI than to OpenAI.
https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/ai-policy-in-the-trump-administration-and-congress-after-the-2024-elections/
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-maintaining-american-leadership-artificial-intelligence/Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#8> 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…
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Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#9Not 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.
Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly
#10[deleted]