> The price tag on this stuff, in human capital, data, and hardware, is high enough to preclude that sort of “perfect competition” environment.

I feel like we right now live in that perfect competition environment though. Inference is mostly commoditized, and it’s a race to the bottom for price and latency. I don’t think any of the big providers are making super-normal profit, and are probably discounting inference for access to data/users.

Only because everyone believes it’s a winner takes all game and this perfect competition will only last for as long as the winner hasn’t come out on top yet.

> everyone believes it’s a winner takes all game

Why would anyone think that, and why do you think everyone thinks that?

Because tech is now a handful of baronial oligopolies, and the AI companies are fighting to be the next generation of same.

And this pattern has repeated itself reliably since the industrial revolution.

Successful ASI would essentially end this process, because after ASI there's nowhere else for humans to go (in tech at least.)

Everyone always thinks this at least in big tech I’ve never heard a PM or exec say a market is not winner take all. It’s some weird corpo grift lang that nothing is worth doing unless its winner take all.