The barrier to entry has always been the winning factor for lot of rapid growth businesses. In previous era, it was ability to afford massive cloud infra and ar

The barrier to entry has always been the winning factor for lot of rapid growth businesses. In previous era, it was ability to afford massive cloud infra and army of expensive SWE to build global scale distributed systems. AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Stripe, Paypal, Google, Netflix and all the “internet” tech had many competitors but only these could afford the cloud scale growth and overtake the market. In LLM era, it is the compute cost of the hardware that is differentiating the barrier to entry for winners and anything that do not have massive budget for both training and marketing are never heard of unless they are in self-hype narrow field(Cursor). It is also sad that, AI is hyped to progress environmental and medical research and there were some impressive feats, but all the hype and money is literally going to chatbot shops, hence marketing budget is also another barrier to entry.