I don’t think that your premise concerning “planetary-scale AI” (and the ability to pull it off) holds up. If Google and Microsoft are so dominant and had such

I don’t think that your premise concerning “planetary-scale AI” (and the ability to pull it off) holds up. If Google and Microsoft are so dominant and had such an insurmountable head start, why are we seeing such an enormous number of AI startups? In fact, there are countless startups busy figuring out how to make AI work for software development. I’d even argue that copilot was not that expensive to build. I very much doubt that GitHub (or Microsoft for that matter) had a huge team working on this or has spent such a vast amount on hardware resources that they’d outcompete the rest of the market by virtue of their cash reserves. Any decently funded startup should be able to finance such as effort. Especially since in this case, the training data is cheap (and legal) to access for anyone. Where Microsoft does have an “unfair advantage” is in their marketing and sales firepower. Replicating their B2B and B2C sales channels is indeed very expensive. GitHub will be able to monetise Copilot by some upselling campaign. Then again, startups regularly manage to break into markets that are supposedly locked down by the likes of Microsoft.