I think the closest analogy we have of the AI boom is the mid 90s browser wars.
First all the money went into the browsers like Mosaic then Netscape. Then the browser got commoditized, but that didn't mean the value went away. A better business model came along, and lo and behold, the Chrome browser went open source. The browser became free, and the scale of adoption meant a lot of value could still be extracted.
A free browser product didn't mean the value of Chrome went away. Rather the opposite. It's a gateway for buying stuff through Google search.
Marc Andressen was the "Mosaic browser" guy before he was the investor guy, so the folks in the early days did not lose all their money. Quite the opposite. Many are now billionaire oligarchs.
LLMs will likely go the way of the browser... commoditized, then free, then appropriated to shove ads into your face. I predict a lot of safety and interpretability research will be leveraged to one day push ads, just like "Golden Gate Claude" could be manipulated to think of itself as the Golden Gate Bridge.
First all the money went into the browsers like Mosaic then Netscape. Then the browser got commoditized, but that didn't mean the value went away. A better business model came along, and lo and behold, the Chrome browser went open source. The browser became free, and the scale of adoption meant a lot of value could still be extracted.
A free browser product didn't mean the value of Chrome went away. Rather the opposite. It's a gateway for buying stuff through Google search.
Marc Andressen was the "Mosaic browser" guy before he was the investor guy, so the folks in the early days did not lose all their money. Quite the opposite. Many are now billionaire oligarchs.
LLMs will likely go the way of the browser... commoditized, then free, then appropriated to shove ads into your face. I predict a lot of safety and interpretability research will be leveraged to one day push ads, just like "Golden Gate Claude" could be manipulated to think of itself as the Golden Gate Bridge.