1) the opportunities for vertical integration are huge. Anthropic originally said they didn’t want to build IDEs, then realized the pivot to Claude Code was available to them. Likewise when one of these companies can gobble up Legal, Medical, etc why would they let companies like Harvey capture the margins?
2) oss models are 6-12 months behind the frontier because of distillation. If labs close their models the gap will widen. Once vertical integration kicks off, the distillation cost becomes higher, and the benefit of opening up generic APIs becomes lower.
I can imagine worlds where things don’t turn out this way, but I think folks are generally underrating the possibilities here.
1) the opportunities for vertical integration are huge. Anthropic originally said they didn’t want to build IDEs, then realized the pivot to Claude Code was available to them. Likewise when one of these companies can gobble up Legal, Medical, etc why would they let companies like Harvey capture the margins?
2) oss models are 6-12 months behind the frontier because of distillation. If labs close their models the gap will widen. Once vertical integration kicks off, the distillation cost becomes higher, and the benefit of opening up generic APIs becomes lower.
I can imagine worlds where things don’t turn out this way, but I think folks are generally underrating the possibilities here.