One person can write sqllite. You can iterate up to bigger opensource DBs like postgre.
One person cannot create a modern LLM model unless they have 10s of millions of dollars to burn on compute.
LLMs are a fundamental shift from what was achievable in software and OSS, and we're basically living off scraps from the big players releasing their old models. They're already trying to create regulatory moats too.
Oracle is far and away better than any of the open source databases. For a long time it wasn’t particularly close.
Db didn’t get parity with Oracle, they got good enough that you have to justify spending for Oracle and incurring the down sides of its company’s model.
Similarly, no db that competes with Oracle was written by one person, they were and are funded mostly by private companies and foundations.
There is a future where open weight models are good enough and the foundation labs are the truly luxury tier for a small subset of the user base.
That’s before talking about something like productivity software which Google _gives away_ while it’s a main business of Microsoft.
Blindly saying that there is only a future where the foundation llms capture all of the business is hyperbolic and ignores history. The llms look more db shaped to me than they look like car shares. Those truly are network effect dominated.
You mean the history where MS captured the OS, Applle/Google the phone, Google capture the entire search market for 20 years, Facebook the social web, Amazon shopping, NVidia/AMD, Netflix, Spotify, I could go on and on and on.
Most things in tech settle into monopolies or duopolies.
LLMs are more akin to the search market than the database market. They need to be updated constantly.
Selectively picking out the one technology that's basically no-one's primary business is an odd way to try and convince me. It must be over 20 years now since any large company consider a DB to be a significant product.
Open source winners like Linux and MySql/Postgre are the oddity, not the norm.
You made a more specific claim than it being captured by a monopoly or duopoly. You claimed that the leaders definitively will cause dramatic price increases implying that the current pricing are just for capturing market share (ala uber/lyft).
Yet for every example you just delivered that _did not happen_. OSes have wide choice including a free option that is widely used, phones got cheaper, Amazon does not have a monopoly for online shopping, Netflix and Spotify compete in extremely cut throat markets with very low margin. Then there are the other players that tried that exact model and are failing (eg doordash and Grubhub).
The “bait and switch” approach requires there to be no viable alternative. Where we’ve seen that is in products with very strong network effects. To date the ai market doesn’t display that, if you don’t like cursor go to vs code, if Claude is better than Gemini it is trivial to switch, etc.
One person can write sqllite. You can iterate up to bigger opensource DBs like postgre.
One person cannot create a modern LLM model unless they have 10s of millions of dollars to burn on compute.
LLMs are a fundamental shift from what was achievable in software and OSS, and we're basically living off scraps from the big players releasing their old models. They're already trying to create regulatory moats too.