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Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Would be helpful to have some concrete examples of what it did a

Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Would be helpful to have some concrete examples of what it did and what OpenAI is trying to do. The point of the article sounds plausible, but doesn't really present any evidence to support it. Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has.

cute_boi 2y ago
Idk why government can't even regulate variable pricing that Visa/MC charges...
- Kwpolska 2y ago
  European governments can. The US government could, but the Visa/MC lobbyists are so nice and friendly.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ADeerAppeared 2y ago
> Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has. I think this is misreading how literal the comparison is meant to be; Sherwood's running a bunch of "OpenAI is X" articles today. This is not about the massive duopoly which has been catastrophic for US payments, but about the way companies entrench themselves. > Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Those details are in the linked WSJ article; https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/visa-wanted-a-vast-empire-first-it-had-to-beat-back-its-foes-3b3067f3 https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/visa-wanted-a-vast-empir... > but doesn't really present any evidence to support it. The main points of concern are mentioned; OpenAI is pushing for "AI regulation" that focusses on the nebulous "doomsday"/skynet scenarios, rather than any of the material harms of AI. The subtext of that is a straightforward "you should ban anyone else building AI because only we can do it safely". Similarly, OpenAI demanding it's investors not fund competitors is pretty ridiculous and explicitly trying to establish a monopoly.
- naniwaduni 2y ago
  > I think this is misreading how literal the comparison is meant to be; Sherwood's running a bunch of "OpenAI is X" articles today. This is ... a useful piece of information with which to update our credulity of the narrative these articles are trying to present.
  - mining 2y ago
    https://sherwood.news/tech/what-companys-past-reveals-the-future-of-openai/ https://sherwood.news/tech/what-companys-past-reveals-the-fu... provides more context as to what the articles are trying to achieve.
    - Gravityloss 2y ago
      That's actually a nice way to write. Nobody knows for real what is going to happen. It's so frustrating to see a writer chase down one narrow narrative and cherry pick anecdotes etc. Understanding what just happened is often more complex. And the future is even more open.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > Those details are in the linked WSJ article; https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/visa-wanted-a-vast-empir https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/visa-wanted-a-vast-empir... if you're trying to make a point in an article, summarize your evidence rather than link to a paywalled article that your readers may not be able to access
- jncfhnb 2y ago
  The duopoly isn’t really as problematic as the concept itself. Credit cards, where customers are bribed to insert a middleman into all transactions and suppliers are largely powerless to refuse it; are a plague. The switching costs of a consumer to a different credit card are small. The switching cost of a business saying they no longer allow certain payment types is potentially very painful.
  - 2y ago
nottorp 2y ago
> Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has. They've been working very hard on getting one for at least a year though. Every time Altman whines about the dangers of AI, he's lobbying for government regulation that would raise barriers to entry into the market. And please no, god forbid there are any free solutions. Let's drown them in regulation worth a few hundred million per year.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  All he’d have to do is get interest rates to rise 25bps and then poof, his competitors would evaporate.
  - pixl97 2y ago
    Saying we should replicate the Russian economy then?
    - doctorpangloss 2y ago
      I'm mocking the whole idea of this or that lobbying being done to crush a particular competitor, when tech companies are very much a Rising Tide Lifts All Boats business.
      - pixl97 2y ago
        Tech companies like Microsoft, one of the few ever convicted monopolists in the US
      - nottorp 2y ago
        They don't want to crush a particular competitor, they want to crush all competitors :)
  - derektank 2y ago
    I think Google has deeper pockets than OAI. The only competition I can see getting priced out by higher interest rates is Anthropic
mdasen 2y ago
Yea, I don't want to defend Visa, but a lot of their dominance came from network effects. Merchants want to accept Visa because it's what people have in their wallet. Customers want Visa because it's what merchants accept. That cycle keeps reinforcing itself. That's not to say that Visa hasn't worked toward favorable regulations, but the biggest problem with alternative payment networks (to Visa/MC/Discover/AMEX) is that most retailers don't take them which means most customers don't want to set them up. If most customers don't have those payment methods, there's little incentive for a merchant to setup those payment methods. With OpenAI, there isn't the same network effect. I don't care what LLM you're using or what LLM Walmart or anyone else is using. If Anthropic or Google start offering better/cheaper LLMs, companies can simply switch over. Maybe some integrations will need to be rewritten, but that's a lot easier than getting hundreds of millions of customers to sign up for something new. Plus, companies like Google are simply implementing the OpenAI API so that integrations don't have to be rewritten. By contrast, if another company launches a payment network, it isn't enough just to convince a company to switch. You need to convince millions of consumers to switch - which would require convincing enough companies to switch.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  > but the biggest problem with alternative payment networks (to Visa/MC/Discover/AMEX) is that most retailers don't take them Who? I thought it was just like Costco that didn't take Discover/Amex/MC due to Visa contract. Aren't all the credit card terminals pretty much from 3p vendors who support everything including Apple Pay + Square + etc?
  - em500 2y ago
    In most of Europe and several large Asian cities I visited, AMEX and Discover acceptance is far lower than Visa/MC (which charge lower fees to merchants).
    - messe 2y ago
      AMEX/Discover is virtually unknown in most of Europe. Outside of US-defaultism, why in the world would anyone expect it to be accepted here?
jpcom 2y ago
are you allergic to doing your own research like everyone else on hacker news? someone took the time to write a thought provoking article and all i see is critical reception.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  When an article provokes thoughts with assertions that OpenAI has a meaningful monopoly on AI to maintain, sometimes those thoughts are “that article is just wrong.”
  - jpcom 2y ago
    >As of December 2024, OpenAI's ChatGPT maintains a dominant position in the AI chatbot market, with over 300 million weekly active users, processing more than 1 billion messages daily. (THE VERGE) >In contrast, Anthropic's Claude AI has experienced significant growth, with its website receiving over 54.4 million monthly visits. (NOTTA)
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > allergic to doing your own research like everyone else on hacker news if an article wants to make a point, then the onus in on the article author to present evidence that supports their view, not on the readers to try to find the evidence supporting the author's view
  - jpcom 2y ago
    that seems like a very convenient and lazy interpretation of what hacker news is for. a comment can be anything, including info that helps clarify what the original poster said. can we come to the forum in good faith, or is anonymity too tempting a mistress?
reissbaker 2y ago
It's written by Taylor Lorenz. I wouldn't expect it to be particularly well-researched; just to have a maximally anti-tech slant.
- alexcannan 2y ago
  Nothing in this article is anti-tech. Anti-monopoly, yes.
  - reissbaker 2y ago
    OpenAI is not a monopoly and has numerous extremely large and well funded competitors such as Google (gemini), Meta (llama), and Alibaba (qwen), to say nothing of smaller startups like Anthropic. The blog post blindly asserts it's a monopoly because monopolies are bad. Taylor Lorenz also insists that everyone continue masking and social distancing for Covid and that refusing to do so in 2024 is equivalent to denying AIDS during the height of the AIDS epidemic. And she obsessively lies about her age to the extent that her actual birth year is listed as a range of plausible years on Wikipedia, since she's changed her statements repeatedly by wild margins. I think her compulsive, somewhat paranoid difficulty engaging with reality is important context when reading her (many) vague, unresearched, but extremely negative blog posts about tech.
    - shadowerm 2y ago
      She is obviously a true believer or very clever self promoter that knows her target market. The real question is why is such stupid shit like this being posted here? Anthropic is actually a great example of the free market working well. To compare OpenAI to Standard Oil just shows the person has no idea of the business practices of Standard Oil.
- derektank 2y ago
  Yeah, her beat as a journalist has historically been social media[1]. I'm not sure what value she brings to a discussion of market dynamics and lobbying; she doesn't seem to have any sources close to either Congress or OpenAI so this comes across as more of an opinion piece than anything else. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/taylor-lorenz/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/taylor-lorenz/
AdieuToLogic 2y ago
> Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Visa, the organization, is little more than a small clearing house. Credit card issuers (banks) and credit card processors (also banks) define the network in so far as determining what organizations can be "on the visa rails" (also almost exclusively banks).
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > Visa ... is little more than a small clearing house worth $600 billion
  - AdieuToLogic 2y ago
    >> Visa ... is little more than a small clearing house > worth $600 billion I think one would find this valuation is in the banks which constitute Visa membership/ownership and not the Visa corporation itself.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
highcountess 2y ago
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cute_boi 2y ago

Idk why government can't even regulate variable pricing that Visa/MC charges...

Kwpolska 2y ago
European governments can. The US government could, but the Visa/MC lobbyists are so nice and friendly.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ADeerAppeared 2y ago

> Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has. I think this is misreading how literal the comparison is meant to be; Sherwood's running a bunch of "OpenAI is X" articles today. This is not about the massive duopoly which has been catastrophic for US payments, but about the way companies entrench themselves. > Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Those details are in the linked WSJ article; https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/visa-wanted-a-vast-empire-first-it-had-to-beat-back-its-foes-3b3067f3 https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/visa-wanted-a-vast-empir... > but doesn't really present any evidence to support it. The main points of concern are mentioned; OpenAI is pushing for "AI regulation" that focusses on the nebulous "doomsday"/skynet scenarios, rather than any of the material harms of AI. The subtext of that is a straightforward "you should ban anyone else building AI because only we can do it safely". Similarly, OpenAI demanding it's investors not fund competitors is pretty ridiculous and explicitly trying to establish a monopoly.

naniwaduni 2y ago
> I think this is misreading how literal the comparison is meant to be; Sherwood's running a bunch of "OpenAI is X" articles today. This is ... a useful piece of information with which to update our credulity of the narrative these articles are trying to present.
- mining 2y ago
  https://sherwood.news/tech/what-companys-past-reveals-the-future-of-openai/ https://sherwood.news/tech/what-companys-past-reveals-the-fu... provides more context as to what the articles are trying to achieve.
  - Gravityloss 2y ago
    That's actually a nice way to write. Nobody knows for real what is going to happen. It's so frustrating to see a writer chase down one narrow narrative and cherry pick anecdotes etc. Understanding what just happened is often more complex. And the future is even more open.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> Those details are in the linked WSJ article; https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/visa-wanted-a-vast-empir https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/visa-wanted-a-vast-empir... if you're trying to make a point in an article, summarize your evidence rather than link to a paywalled article that your readers may not be able to access
jncfhnb 2y ago
The duopoly isn’t really as problematic as the concept itself. Credit cards, where customers are bribed to insert a middleman into all transactions and suppliers are largely powerless to refuse it; are a plague. The switching costs of a consumer to a different credit card are small. The switching cost of a business saying they no longer allow certain payment types is potentially very painful.
- 2y ago

nottorp 2y ago

> Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has. They've been working very hard on getting one for at least a year though. Every time Altman whines about the dangers of AI, he's lobbying for government regulation that would raise barriers to entry into the market. And please no, god forbid there are any free solutions. Let's drown them in regulation worth a few hundred million per year.

doctorpangloss 2y ago
All he’d have to do is get interest rates to rise 25bps and then poof, his competitors would evaporate.
- pixl97 2y ago
  Saying we should replicate the Russian economy then?
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    I'm mocking the whole idea of this or that lobbying being done to crush a particular competitor, when tech companies are very much a Rising Tide Lifts All Boats business.
    - pixl97 2y ago
      Tech companies like Microsoft, one of the few ever convicted monopolists in the US
    - nottorp 2y ago
      They don't want to crush a particular competitor, they want to crush all competitors :)
- derektank 2y ago
  I think Google has deeper pockets than OAI. The only competition I can see getting priced out by higher interest rates is Anthropic

mdasen 2y ago

Yea, I don't want to defend Visa, but a lot of their dominance came from network effects. Merchants want to accept Visa because it's what people have in their wallet. Customers want Visa because it's what merchants accept. That cycle keeps reinforcing itself. That's not to say that Visa hasn't worked toward favorable regulations, but the biggest problem with alternative payment networks (to Visa/MC/Discover/AMEX) is that most retailers don't take them which means most customers don't want to set them up. If most customers don't have those payment methods, there's little incentive for a merchant to setup those payment methods. With OpenAI, there isn't the same network effect. I don't care what LLM you're using or what LLM Walmart or anyone else is using. If Anthropic or Google start offering better/cheaper LLMs, companies can simply switch over. Maybe some integrations will need to be rewritten, but that's a lot easier than getting hundreds of millions of customers to sign up for something new. Plus, companies like Google are simply implementing the OpenAI API so that integrations don't have to be rewritten. By contrast, if another company launches a payment network, it isn't enough just to convince a company to switch. You need to convince millions of consumers to switch - which would require convincing enough companies to switch.

lesuorac 2y ago
> but the biggest problem with alternative payment networks (to Visa/MC/Discover/AMEX) is that most retailers don't take them Who? I thought it was just like Costco that didn't take Discover/Amex/MC due to Visa contract. Aren't all the credit card terminals pretty much from 3p vendors who support everything including Apple Pay + Square + etc?
- em500 2y ago
  In most of Europe and several large Asian cities I visited, AMEX and Discover acceptance is far lower than Visa/MC (which charge lower fees to merchants).
  - messe 2y ago
    AMEX/Discover is virtually unknown in most of Europe. Outside of US-defaultism, why in the world would anyone expect it to be accepted here?

jpcom 2y ago

are you allergic to doing your own research like everyone else on hacker news? someone took the time to write a thought provoking article and all i see is critical reception.

sokoloff 2y ago
When an article provokes thoughts with assertions that OpenAI has a meaningful monopoly on AI to maintain, sometimes those thoughts are “that article is just wrong.”
- jpcom 2y ago
  >As of December 2024, OpenAI's ChatGPT maintains a dominant position in the AI chatbot market, with over 300 million weekly active users, processing more than 1 billion messages daily. (THE VERGE) >In contrast, Anthropic's Claude AI has experienced significant growth, with its website receiving over 54.4 million monthly visits. (NOTTA)
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> allergic to doing your own research like everyone else on hacker news if an article wants to make a point, then the onus in on the article author to present evidence that supports their view, not on the readers to try to find the evidence supporting the author's view
- jpcom 2y ago
  that seems like a very convenient and lazy interpretation of what hacker news is for. a comment can be anything, including info that helps clarify what the original poster said. can we come to the forum in good faith, or is anonymity too tempting a mistress?

reissbaker 2y ago

It's written by Taylor Lorenz. I wouldn't expect it to be particularly well-researched; just to have a maximally anti-tech slant.

alexcannan 2y ago
Nothing in this article is anti-tech. Anti-monopoly, yes.
- reissbaker 2y ago
  OpenAI is not a monopoly and has numerous extremely large and well funded competitors such as Google (gemini), Meta (llama), and Alibaba (qwen), to say nothing of smaller startups like Anthropic. The blog post blindly asserts it's a monopoly because monopolies are bad. Taylor Lorenz also insists that everyone continue masking and social distancing for Covid and that refusing to do so in 2024 is equivalent to denying AIDS during the height of the AIDS epidemic. And she obsessively lies about her age to the extent that her actual birth year is listed as a range of plausible years on Wikipedia, since she's changed her statements repeatedly by wild margins. I think her compulsive, somewhat paranoid difficulty engaging with reality is important context when reading her (many) vague, unresearched, but extremely negative blog posts about tech.
  - shadowerm 2y ago
    She is obviously a true believer or very clever self promoter that knows her target market. The real question is why is such stupid shit like this being posted here? Anthropic is actually a great example of the free market working well. To compare OpenAI to Standard Oil just shows the person has no idea of the business practices of Standard Oil.
derektank 2y ago
Yeah, her beat as a journalist has historically been social media[1]. I'm not sure what value she brings to a discussion of market dynamics and lobbying; she doesn't seem to have any sources close to either Congress or OpenAI so this comes across as more of an opinion piece than anything else. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/taylor-lorenz/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/taylor-lorenz/

AdieuToLogic 2y ago

> Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Visa, the organization, is little more than a small clearing house. Credit card issuers (banks) and credit card processors (also banks) define the network in so far as determining what organizations can be "on the visa rails" (also almost exclusively banks).

insane_dreamer 2y ago
> Visa ... is little more than a small clearing house worth $600 billion
- AdieuToLogic 2y ago
  >> Visa ... is little more than a small clearing house > worth $600 billion I think one would find this valuation is in the banks which constitute Visa membership/ownership and not the Visa corporation itself.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

highcountess 2y ago

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