How did we end up with Frontier Lab oligopoly rather than a monopoly?

2 points by bdhe 22h ago ↗ HN

Frontier labs - OpenAI / Anthropic / Google Deep Mind

Wireless - ATT / Verizon

however,

Search - Google

Videos - Youtube

Social networking - Facebook

Microblogging - Twitter

I know there are competitors for all the dominant players in my list, but the market share distributions are very different imo.

Is it complete randomness that markets converge on monopolies vs. oligopolies? Or is there something principled or systemic behind that?

2 comments

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verdverm 22h ago ↗

on one hand, models are not as hard to train as they want you to believe, researcher churn between labs, know how diffusion

on the other, it's the same group, people connected to money, with soap opera drama

giantg2 10h ago ↗

You're comparing mature products to products that are earlier in the lifestyle.

Take your Google search example. Maybe you're one of those youngsters, but Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, etc used to be substantial competitors. And there were some predecessors too.