I feel this is part of a larger and very old business trend.
But do we need 20 companies copying each other and doing the same thing?
Like, is that really competition? I'd say competition is when you do something slightly different, but I guess it's subjective based on your interpretation of what is a commodity and what is proprietary.
To my view, everyone is outright copying and creating commodity markets:
OpenAI: The OG, the Coke of Modern AI
Claude: The first copycat, The Pepsi of Modern AI
Mistral: Euro OpenAI
DeepSeek: Chinese OpenAI
Grok/xAI: Republican OpenAI
Google/MSFT: OpenAI clone as a SaaS or Office package.
I don't think they're actually the same thing, I definitely feel like Claude is much better with code than ChatGPT is so there are clearly differences in the capabilities of these models. One analogy that I find helpful here is the idea that these AIs are like animals. Just like there are animals of the same family (meaning they're genetically related to some degree) they still adapt to different niches. I see all these AI companies ultimately creating models analogous to that.
Some AIs will be good at coding (perhaps in a particular language or ecosystem), some at analyzing information and churning out a report for you, and some will be better at operating in physical spaces.
Will check it out. I like that we are all on the same page that Openness is a numerical value rather than a boolean, the challenge now is how to measure and define it, especially with ML
But do we need 20 companies copying each other and doing the same thing?
Like, is that really competition? I'd say competition is when you do something slightly different, but I guess it's subjective based on your interpretation of what is a commodity and what is proprietary.
To my view, everyone is outright copying and creating commodity markets:
OpenAI: The OG, the Coke of Modern AI
Claude: The first copycat, The Pepsi of Modern AI
Mistral: Euro OpenAI
DeepSeek: Chinese OpenAI
Grok/xAI: Republican OpenAI
Google/MSFT: OpenAI clone as a SaaS or Office package.
Meta's Llama: Open Source OpenAI
etc...