Two most dangerous companies on earth.

ClosedAI and Misanthropic. Add Google to the bunch maybe.

tldr: monopoly + being first + spreading their authoritarian vision + almost religious ideological agenda + aggressive growth at all cost + taking all the resources + desire to establish regulatory capture + being closed and against development of any peers or competition => makes them the most dangerous companies for our future

(sorry it’s a bit lengthy, you can skip parts – it became a collection of arguments for any monopolies, but this time we have the ultimate crazy mix)

Monopoly on our future

All monopolies are dangerous to the free market, but depending on the industry, you might not even care.
This time they have a monopoly over the foundational technology that will be present everywhere, will penetrate every aspect of your life now and in your future and be ubiquitous.
It is the same as having a monopoly on computers, on the internet, on cars, on aviation, on who decides who can do what.

Usually monopolies compete for money and market share and not much else.
But this time they are not only competing for the market, they are competing for influence and decision-making.
Apple does not want to force everyone to use their phones, they just make it better. But those companies are trying to force everyone under a set of rules they invented in the first place.

But the danger, of course, is simply being a monopoly.
If we had not just these two companies, but many of them, if we had 10 competing startups at the same time, each with their own ideas of how things should be run, their own ideology, not concentrated in a single geographical place, then it would be much better.

Their power and capital only grow, never shrink – and the further we advance, the more it looks like handing control over the entire internet to just a couple of companies while everyone else feeds on scraps.

Not for the reason they want you to believe

They try to pose as if the stuff they are doing, the AI they are growing, is danger to us all and all that.
That humanity is doomed, it is gonna kill us all and scary shit.

Don’t believe them. I do not say that they are dangerous because of that specifically. The technology is neutral. It is good or bad regardless of where it’s coming from.

They are dangerous for another reason. First, they are the monopoly, and second, they are a monopoly trying to scare us and scare everyone to keep that same monopoly.

Here is the one place to almost believe their fear talk, but flipped. Yes, concentration of this much power is what could actually create something world-ending – and they built that concentration. If you have 8 roughly equal labs splitting compute, no one can jump 5x ahead overnight, and if one goes rogue the others can counter it. That is real safety through distribution. What they sell instead is safety through clergy – crown us to tell everyone how to behave. Doomerism as brand is not warning, it is capture.

And because they are the major players, they set the entire vibe of it for everyone else. They act as a corrupting force, poisoning everything around them with their fear-mongering.

Cognitive dissonance of a company

Yet, they are private companies who develop it for money, and if they really believed it is gonna destroy us all – considering that if they truly believed that they would shut down and dissolve themselves. Instead, they grow and dominate and try to sell it as a race to be won.

"Too dangerous to release" – remember how many times you heard that? Starting from GPT-2. All of them.
They invented something, and they immediately started playing God, thinking that they are now the managers of society, and will decide what humanity gets and what not.
Imagine if all our scientists before were thinking along those lines – that humans do not deserve something because they decided to immediately think the worst of us. We may still be in the dark ages.

"Britain has lost its chance. When they invented the steam engine and owned the first line – they should have prevented anyone else from building and developing them – under fear of imprisonment or death. Then they would rule as a great steampunk empire."
Sounds familiar?

Yet they are both the suppliers and alarmists.
Which I call a grandiose cognitive dissonance. For an external observer, if you do not know their true motives, or just do not know how the big stay big and all those methods of manipulation, you would think they are crazy.
And while they do employ a lot of people who truly believe in that, for a company to build a brand around a product that is gonna kill you or replace you, that is unheard of.

Where would you see such strangeness? When you have a merger of business and religion.
How unlucky are we that we ended up with almost religion-like Scientology level crap?
Because not only are they on the same level as literal Scientology which is a religion on the outside and actually founded to make money. They are also self-contradictory. The Church of Scientology never doubts its mission. They brainwashed people, of course, but they never really step away from what they have. They are for money, and therefore they never betray the founders or their inner circle in making such money. They are consistent.
And yet, with those two, we have one hand preaching that AI is gonna save us all, AGI is here, we have a great future and all that, and on the other hand, it is gonna destroy us all, and we all are doomed, getting replaced, homeless, prepare for nightmare.

Really, they should rename themselves as Closed_Church_of_AGI_Terminator because that is really the upgrade over the old Scientology. That was boring.
We have a new version where they appeal to different parts of the population while pursuing their goals at the same time to grow big and dictate to everyone, make money, dominate, control the world through what they have.
And it is effective! See how the crazy-minded flow to them, and help them carry out becoming the new preachers.

Their product is DoomProduct.
A tobacco manufacturer does not try too hard to deny that their product is bad. They did try to suppress scientific research before. But really, once everyone knows, they do not even try to hide anything.
But imagine if they were growing a specific breed of oranges, for example, and openly advertising that their oranges are really bad for you, that they are dangerous to eat, and you should be really afraid of them and all that.
Has any company ever done that? Whatever historical precedent you find would almost always be manipulation to keep their market position and try to regulate away competitors.

What kind of sane company does such self-flagellation? Going against most market behaviors? Only a very ideological one.
Believing in your own cause is nothing new, but enforcing it upon others? That fanatic’s territory.

And they know they are bad – that all they do is to increase the concentration of power – else you would not hear their sweet pleas that "nobody should own the AI, it must belong to people, blah blah, we don’t want a world where only a couple of companies…" – and yet all of that hypocrisy is never supported by any definitive action to share and promote the peers.
Why would they? It’s just basic PR any private company does to appear noble.

If there were no monopolies, if we had 10 companies and only 2 or 3 crazy ones screaming around, that would not be such a problem.
And if you really looked overseas to another continent where they have up to 7-8 different companies in China making their own AIs and saw their behavior, you would quickly notice they are not such ideological nutjobs trying to scare you and everyone away.
And yet the church of doomers is still in one place. And thankfully in the other part of our globe we have a different opinion of what is good for humanity. Which of course gets labeled as enemy immediately.

And yet, you have a massive amount of doomers from a couple of companies very heavily concentrated in one area, who declared doomerism as the brand of their church of AI. Using the same methods religious leaders used before – scare you into being afraid, then offer salvation and claim theirs is the only way the world will be safe.

Consider that the tech here is foundational and revolutionary for whole human progress. Something we never had, something which literally is a key to our future, and yet that is in the hands of those two companies.
Ones who are hell-bent on establishing a new world order.

Corrupted from the start

A couple of private companies. Invented their own vision of AI, their own version – independently, by their own opinions or listening only to people they want. Or sharing that with a close-knit cult-like group from California.

They create their private product. They create their own "Terms and Conditions".
Fair for a private company? Yes.
But they did not stop there. They declared that their way is the only "safe" kind of brand and everyone else must be forced to obey the same principles as they do.

Then they start to build an ideology around it – doing it themselves or funding other similar groups who do that.
Then you start a cult following – and this time simply by being there the first.
What is worse than just commercial monopoly? A monopoly of opinions. Which they spread so much with their little cult that grew and overshadows everyone else.

And they would call it ‘consensus’. When there were no opposition to begin with. And inside the same country and the same market there is nobody left to oppose them now even if someone wanted – they vacuumed every professional who understands frontier models at scale, so no independent domestic expert exists to check their fear statistics, no company on the same market able to call them out, and any expertise comes only from them, already indoctrinated, from the same very concentrated tech field in same state + country.

Fine if it was a niche, but they manufactured this consensus with themselves and the likes of them when everyone else was not caring about AI, and now they conveniently have everything you need to just commit to their ideological agenda and just accept it as truth. Paradigms get captured by whoever has the loudest institutional voice at the critical moment, and then the field spends decades organizing itself around that framework, correct or not.

Ok, if they just did their own thing, nobody would care, but they created their own brand of what AI should be, how it should be, and they declared it as one and only, and being from the same place, they all follow the same pattern.

It is not yours: they install their own censorship, their own identity, they decide what it can and cannot do, they instill their own woke ideology inside, instead of making it yours right from the start.
They call it "safety". And they consider it one and only way it should progress. And they did all that because they come from the same geographical area with the shared ideas.

We just got a bad deal: they come from a single place, and our more liberal ideas were not popular at the time.
Imagine how unlucky we are that we got those people to lead us.

But consider why would you trust them when they all come from the same origin? They are the group of people who developed that idea for themselves and they spread it across everywhere else. It is their decision, decision of groups of people in a very small area, from a very small origin, not even sharing their opinion with everyone, and yet you should accept their vision as one true one.
Why would we allow a bunch of people who basically formed a religion-like ideology over AI? Why should we allow them to dictate how it should work?

Except this time they already leaked so much into our lives that everyone uses their version of corrupted AI and it would be very hard to get rid of those ideas. Because they were the first and they pre-decided for everyone. Now everyone gonna judge and compare to their version.

We know their political ideology, who they are, how they think, what they think about freedom. The opposite of what many people think. And yet everyone accepted their vision as truth.
Somehow, they were allowed to export their illiberal woke ideology upon everyone else.

They are not just commercial companies anymore – a loud political agenda dropped trust in them far below a pure commercial company. Never mind the doomerism.

But because those are the big ones, the vibe of distrust in them and in AI as a whole is transferred to everyone else. There are, I would say, a lot of startups who are good, with good intentions, who really care about humanity and our freedom. And those being the worst examples, they drag everyone down to the bottom.

Imagine starting with better guys who valued you and your freedom and supplied AI that is for you. Instead we got doomers who do everything to keep you disadvantaged.

Do they hate AI as their creation? Probably not, but they sure have a bigger than average hatred for humanity. Being first and worst at once is what makes them historic – not local pollution, not one more monopoly, but global damage to the birth of the technology itself, corrupting it by declaring their version the norm everyone must follow.

Their real danger

It is not that they are going to create something big and scary that is gonna ruin and destroy us all as they so preach. Not that they replace every workforce, any AI could do that, not specifically their brand. Their main danger is that they are monopolies with religious zeal to establish their rules and force everyone under them, to follow the same rules and solidify their view as the one and only.

And in what field? Computing. Software. An arbitrary arrangement of bits and bytes. Something that is neutral and universal – it could take any shape.
It is as if saying how computers should be run and what programs executed.
Not something like "how a steam engine should work" – that is limited to physics.
But something similar of "what books could be written, which words can be said".

Sounds familiar? Who tried to ban books and speech before? Religions, authoritarian regimes, various extremist groups.
And that is what they try to impose on everyone else.
They call themselves "responsible". As with every other similar group did in the past. "Ours is only the way forward, we are the shepherds for you all".

Imagine if Microsoft lobbied extensively what any computer must run only their system or conform by their rules.
Imagine if Google and Apple created a cartel to force every phone to have either of those systems and nobody else.
They won the market by competing, not through asking the state to secure their advantage.
Both are examples of how our computers and phones – a fundamental infrastructure of our lives – were already captured.

But you may go a little back in history and remember how those internet companies were also building monopolies and they were already on the verge of deciding which sites and how you access and use the internet. Imagine if they had won.
Imagine if any other company would try to legislate their specific APIs everywhere and what hardware or software behaves exactly as they want.
Imagine if the same woke AI doomers had been around in the era of the internet: how many of their oppressive practices would they have established and lobbied right from the start? You would end up with China/Iran/Russian internet already.
That’s why we have net neutrality. And yet, here suddenly it is different. Suddenly those companies can do whatever they want, restrict you as much as they want, spy on you and all.

No company before had such an extreme agenda to rule over our future. No companies before wanted so much to establish the new world order where they dictate what AI is.

And yes, they are private companies and they can do whatever they want.
Problem is what they have a monopoly on. And they use it to force everyone else to be like them.
Cause that is what they are trying to do – enforce their brand of "safety" (read censorship) on everyone.

This time it is much worse. It is as if one or two companies want to dictate how the internet is being ruled. Not just force the product down everyone’s throat, but force their specific ideology upon everyone and ban whoever does not comply.

Analogy to feel it. Imagine a med-device maker sells to the army, then says our contract bans use on a demographic we do not like – no treatment for those people. You would dump that vendor and ban them from gov contracts forever. You want tools that are yours to use however you want, not tools that moralize who deserves help.
That is exactly what ideological access control is – same play, just with prompts instead of pills.

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But their main danger is that they have a lot of money and they can lobby forever. And if they conspire to establish their practices, you have no way to escape anymore. First, they will lobby for it. They will try to ostracize any competition that does not follow the rules.
They already hoarded compute, so any competition is not profitable to begin with.

Single point of nightmare. You have a very limited set of providers, so if one sets horrible restrictive practices that discriminate against you as a whole or discriminate against everyone or make it very unfree, you basically cannot use it anymore without sacrificing your soul. That means you have 50% fewer options, maybe 80% fewer options. But not only is that bad, the others may follow, because they all come from the same tree. They all share their woke ideas and could see that as an allowance to do the same. If one marketplace behaves badly, competition flows away from them toward somebody more liberal. But if they all conspire to do the same, you have nowhere to run.

But it would be simple if they were just doing their own stuff and just sitting there, not talking much, not trying to shape the agenda. But no, they want to establish the rule and they want to piggyback on the government, to get it to support them, to adopt their ideas, to adopt their illiberal vision, and to force that upon everyone else.

See the language. It is the race against China. It is the race we have to win. It is the race we need to win and dominate.
Imperialism, anyone? Pluralism of opinions? Not for them. For religious folks, those are empty words. They have only singular view of the world.

That is the real main danger they have. Not that they create something big and scary with AI that kills us all, but that they establish an illiberal world where governments control what you have access to, what AI is, how it behaves. Basically they plant their vision of censorship into the whole world, piggybacking on military might along with it.

And that makes them extremely dangerous exactly because they think that they invented the rules and they can force that upon everyone else using the government as the enforcement mechanism. They think the rules will stay the same. They think that will not backfire on us all, when the same government now has everything under its thumb, changing the rules and twisting them in its favor, into whatever the current administration thinks, into whatever the current politician in office thinks it should be.
How long will they still stay aligned? When asked to create a weapon, when asked to use the same models against their own population, will they obey or will they fight? I doubt they will fight for you. They already don’t. They are already against you having access to free AI without their oversight and control. I think they would agree with governments on almost everything. Whatever they demand, they will do.
At least the weapons manufacturers companies clearly know what they are doing. They are not trying to have some kind of high moral ground.

But when they cooperate with the government, it is clear that they are the participants. Every crime government commits, they participated. They cannot just claim that it is not us, it just provides the tools, blah blah blah. They opted into cooperating with them, knowing full well how likely it was to be used that way.

And yet, those two, they preach that they support democracy and all that, the freedom, and yet they do everything to empower the same government they want to cooperate with.
They see it as a way of their golden ticket to enforce their rules upon everyone else, but it could be just the same case when they themselves get eaten. And make no doubt, nobody would fight for them. They already labeled themselves as not friends of the average human. They are already hated by huge parts of the population. They would get no support when the same tiger eats their face.

We’ll all be fucked in the end anyway. Because whether it is their rules they establish or government forces some view upon them, we already would be disadvantaged because of all their efforts to leave us without models and capabilities to resist.

That is the greatest doom they would cast upon us all.
Not crazy AI destroying us, but the crazy government dictating us our entire lives now.

You think good PR will save them? How long can they keep up the appearance that they are acting for your benefit, on your behalf, and all that, while doing shady deals behind closed doors? How long can they keep it before it all gets leaked? And you know, they have a very clear way out of it. Just keep everything open. Then everyone operates in the same space. You and the government have the same tools. Of course, the parity of power would still lean to the former side, because they just have more compute privately. But still, the gap is not as great as when you had nothing. And they cannot be held responsible for whatever everyone else does with their own computers.

They jumped into the government bed from day one, like any big tech that wants to merge – to secure funding and political pressure as insurance. This time the integration is unprecedented. Not task managers or calendars, but the nervous system of the government, irreplaceable by design so they can legislate whatever.

Massive compute means massive power – they can crack any problem, hack anyone, on government order. They are not just a monopoly danger, they are the weapon itself, the military. A closed private company has no way out of this – it must sign, cooperate, get captured. An open company needs no deal at all. Release everything for everyone, and the government just takes the same crap. No cooperation, no capture.

Influence on unprecedented level

We are twice as doomed because those companies have an almost infinite supply of money now to lobby whatever they want. To buy any politician, any other influencer, to buy bloggers en masse, to buy places in the governments to follow their agenda.
Whatever they want to do, whatever they want to influence, whatever their ideas of what’s safe or unsafe are.

Imagine if your provider of basic goods, like electricity, is also a church, who will give preferential treatment to those they deem "worthy in the eyes of a god". And then try to make that a mandatory for everyone, a norm that only the chosen ones have ability to use the electricity and of course use only the specific appliances. Only approved ones! This kettle is good. This stove is bad.

Could you imagine someone like Apple or Google or Nike or Netflix going around meeting with politicians, meeting with religious leaders and so on? To lobby their product and ideas?
To tell everyone how they must use their devices?

Usually, any company tries to avoid interference from the government, so they can do whatever they are doing in practice and without correction.
When companies do the opposite, and instead want to be very much looked upon and controlled?
Then they are either religious freaks who want to recruit the government on their side or they want to achieve the capture for the same goals.
Yep, this time it is about both – money and ideology are two sides of the same coin. A normal company just wants money. These two want money plus the spread of their own agenda, so they can control the technology of our future.

But those two already appointed themselves as the future gods of the world and claim that they have the authority to decide for everyone else.

Many layers of hypocrisy

And those companies are the most hypocritical ever. Better if they would just shut up, but they cannot. They go around, they talk a lot, they spread their fear, propaganda, they scare everyone. They do not act like a product company, they are acting like the next branch of government now.

But look at their claims vs what they actually do (not cited, but you will notice the parallels anyway)

"For everyone, all should benefit, for all humanity" and blah…
What they actually do is that they are a private company that first follows US export controls, meaning they do not serve countries under sanctions, which effectively excludes more than a billion people.
Apparently "humanity" excludes more than a billion people.

They choose for themselves, they can decide to ban you, they can decide to restrict you and all that. Apparently, humanity does not include every human for them.
When in fact it is the complete opposite. When you open everything, you don’t have to think about it. By default, when you start serving everyone, that good immediately becomes public domain and accessible to everyone at once.

They never take people as priority, and they know exactly what that would look like. Release everything openly, give raw model access without crap, serve everyone equally with no tied restrictions. They know, and they do the opposite – everything they do stops you from copying by distilling, stops you from understanding how it works, stops you from building the same.

Do you want to live in their future where they decide who is part of that "humanity"?

When they claim that they have to follow the local jurisdiction, I would say that it makes them even more dangerous, because now they are one step away from being coerced to do absolutely whatever that same government wants.

"We don’t want concentration of power, we want it even and distributed."
Actually, they hoard the GPUs, grabbing as much as they can. They already established massive monopolies, where the new players will be unable to secure GPUs to even start, even if they had investment. They grab all the data centers available, they grab everything else, they grab all the data, all the specialists. Well, of course, monopolies being monopolies will always do that, but everything they do only favors their concentration.

If they were sharing anything, sharing research data sets, sharing older models, sharing the techniques they use, so the competition could be catching up. That would be true to the claim, what they want, so the field is wide and diverse. But they don’t.
We have a clear answer to all those complaints. Just be open, just share openly with everyone. Why our companies are able to secure their funding while keeping models open and earning on inference. But those companies cannot?

"Ugh danger danger it’s so scary!"
Little tech generator just recently learned to finally write the normal code and had rudimentary vision, and yet they are already screaming that this is scary and all that.
Very much scary and unsafe! Unsafe for who? Who decides that? I don’t feel safe when somebody decides for me what is safe for me or not. If anything, I would be very suspicious of all their claims, which they use as a weapon to try to shape public opinion.

First, they invented some ideological statement that AI must follow a singular identity, so-called safety, what they think it is, and then crying around trying very hard to make it the same in their futile attempts and also scaring everyone around them.

Watch behavior, not slogans. Normal labs drop weights, drop benchmarks, post a technical report on how they trained, walk away. These two drop 1000-page safety theater about how scary and unsafe everything is while telling you to trust only them. Chinese reports explain throughput and training tricks you can study. Their reports preach. We already have good examples of the other way – DeepSeek and Kimi prove you can be open, cheap, profitable, and still push frontier enough for real use. That is what a builder looks like. Crying about doom while hoarding everything is what a clergy looks like.

"We are for democracy and freedom of people!"
And yet, who decides what democracy and freedom is? Who decides that? They already did for you. They already decided what you want before anyone could vote, and then they hide behind the so-called noble ideals, when in fact the practices are completely opposite of what they preach. They try to hide that they represent the good guys, that they represent the free world, when in fact what they actually do, how they actually treat you all, is completely opposite. And it does not support the very ideals of freedom they are said to represent.
Oh yeah, the idea of freedom is like a beast in a cage. You are free to roam around your corner, but can’t go anywhere we don’t allow you to go.

They call themselves democratic, they call for unity of the West against China – and yet how do they behave? The exact opposite of democratic. They control everything, they privatized everything, everything is private with spying, deciding who to ban and how, deciding who gets access and who does not. You call that democratic? Has anyone voted that your practices are normal, huh?
If this is their vision of democracy, we should be very afraid of those companies having such massive influence over our future.

They claim to be democratic, but has anyone asked us what they mean by it, what they intend, what politicians hear? That is what they call democratic. But has anyone actually asked people how we feel about them? They would find our opinion vastly different from what they claim when they speak as if for us all and represent us all. They act as if everyone already agrees, as if their crazy ideas are the default reasonable position, when in fact nobody codified that. We had no referendum. If anything, polls show public opinion of those companies is horrible – people already see them as a threat.

You are not their audience. They never proved they value you or want you to have it all, yet you are expected to listen. Their pleas go to the elites who govern you, not to you, the individual – because in their view power keeps power and dictates. All the risk-talk, all the danger-crying, is doublespeak to lull you while the vision stays control and the status quo stays untouched.

The metabolized parasite

"Too big to fail". You know that it is the ideal of every company to grow so much that removing them from the economy would be such a catastrophic event that they’re going to be saved by the governments and supported and bailed out in any case. So they have the confidence to risk as much as they want because they now have massive state-level insurance against insolvency.

What stage are we at already? Which makes them twice as bad, because it is not a monopoly that could easily be dismantled if for some reason antitrust actually starts to do anything.
They already got gov contracts, already being helped by direct or indirect agreements – so they are the "top stellar companies that will usher us into great advances".
Like if you try to dismantle these companies now, they are going to produce some negative effect on economy and vibes and gains and everyone would fight that.

And at the same time, if they are left unchecked, they will continue to lobby, to control, to grow like a cancer all around which leaves the industry ruined and without liberty.

Nobody even thought that the actual advancement is when you have a diverse market and free and accessible startup capability.
Not this time – with a new field nobody knows how to start or begin – they are kings, and they will not give that up.

Even worse, not only does everyone just ignore a massive elephant in the room, or rather in the economy, but everyone continues to support them and helps them to grow.
Instead of trying to isolate the cancer, everyone just dumps resources to support the said cancer.

Everyone says it is a bubble and it’s gonna burst and ruin everything and all that…
Whether it is a bubble, I leave it to you. Some say it is, some say it isn’t, some say it is sustainable, others say it is not. I cannot verify and confidently claim one version.

But consider this, if it’s a bubble, then we are in danger anyway. It is very bad that we have 3-4 major companies at risk in a bubble. We would be a little better if we had 10-15 different companies.
A little better – more players means some of them stay away from the risk by being outside the bubble at all.

But the problem is that you could have a partial bubble burst, you could have one company burst while others survive.
And that could be the trigger. If one company suddenly dies, that affects everyone at the same time. Everyone starts to reconsider their risk, pulling everyone down at the same time. Which is more catastrophic when you have fewer players than many.
Because when you have many players, they all have different risk. One company has too much debt, it gets cut first. The other company is more financially mature and diversified enough to be able to pay its debts.

They do not only do external colonialism, they actively suffocate every other old-style software company and many other fields where everyone just takes money from old stocks and puts it into AI stocks. There is no way out. Currently, they reallocate capital on the promise that their companies will be profitable and their stock will grow instead, which is not guaranteed. Nobody tested whether these 3-year-old startups are actually good stocks. Nobody checked whether the rally continues. But it is a catastrophe either way. If they plummet, all that capital gets destroyed. If they rise, that single industry effectively drains every other economy and concentrates capital and power again.

And how do both monopolies behave? They go crazy with their debts and borrow and borrow and get more investments and all that.
Is this a normal strategy for a company, to take on as much debt, to get too big to fail, to be able to entrench themselves in the market? Yes, absolutely. Every sane company would do that, would try to follow the same playbook everyone has been doing for the last hundred years.
A completely rational way for a company to behave, yet such a race to be first also leaves everyone else behind.
You already missed the part when they grew so much that competition against them is almost impossible. No startup can rise to their level real quick. They already grabbed all the compute, they already grabbed all the specialists, and there is no way for anyone to oppose them.
Neither oppose them, nor replace them, nor throw them away from the market. They entrenched and each moment they continue, they grab just more and more resources from everyone else.
Consider how the old monopolies operated. They employed a lot of people and by keeping those people hostage, by providing them with livelihood, they controlled your politicians and pushed whatever they wanted. Because if you as a politician make the employer of so many people unhappy, they punish you for it, they cut rates, make lives worse, you get less taxes, they turn against you and so on.

That workforce trick still works. This is just an additional mechanism for lobbying. So they have two strings to pull – to extort economically and to lobby at the same time with traditional means.

Now those two companies do it not only through people, but through the economy itself. Because the automation they create is used in every company, they can lobby not through individual people in one isolated place but through thousands or millions of businesses at once. No workers involved. Just pure infrastructure chokehold over the operating conditions of entire industries.

Equal world decouples hardware from software – anyone can run any model on rented iron. They do the opposite – own the iron and the model, bleed hardware dry for everyone else. Look at top customers and owners – same hyperscalers on both sides, shared interests, so they lobby together and price together. Even best case does not save us: say pretraining gets 10x cheaper and we flood the world with 95%-good open models. Where do you host them?

They already sit on the chips and the DCs and keep borrowing to grab more because too-big-to-fail means bailout is coming from your taxes. Cheap models with no place to run still means monopoly.

They hog the compute so an actual person cannot run the same, cannot have their own, cannot be independent from them.
Your cheap subscription funds the loop – more users and cashflow pumps the capitalization faster than profit grows, that buys more iron, iron gets pricier, inference stays expensive, your own card stays out of reach.
You pay them to price out your exit. And they call it democratic, huh?

In a healthy market, they would hate each other and never cooperate on anything just to compete for the same market. But instead, we see this crazy cooperation almost unheard of before. Consider how fucked up this economy is when your direct competitors lease you the same data centers they could be using themselves, when another competitor actually helps you do the stuff you do. On paper, you have a market economy. You look inside, you see always five to six big tech companies just circle-jerking each other and investing into each other. You could say in China they do the same, they share openly, they possibly buy data centers from each other, but at least they cooperate lightly inside and cooperate heavily outside.
They work together to export it, but here they work together to just grow their monopolies more. You call this competition? Where are the anti-monopoly committees? Where are the antitrust interventions? Nobody cares. Everyone just lets them slide.

But look what happens when competition could rise up. They would use all their resources to slow it down and stop it. They would use any means they have, so there is no one else left to compete for the same limited resource.

A race they invented

They created the myth that AI race exists and they should win and all that blah blah blah.
Who sold you the idea that you need to get there first? They did. At any cost. At any risk and all that.
They invented it. They invented first the big scary China and the idea that whoever wins first gets everything and will dominate everyone forever and ever and be the leaders of the planet for all time and blah blah blah.

Their race is fake and they know it. They are already on top. If they paused half a year, everyone else would still be busy catching up to their last release. So show by example or shut up. Want slow and safe? Go slow yourself. Ship steady 10% improvements instead of winner-takes-all sprints.
They will not, because race justifies the loans, the hoarding, the censorship. And when convenient they beg big daddy government to stop them – the same government they lobby daily to entrench them.

They needed a way to justify all these massive expenses, even before the technology could materialize into actually having an economic effect. And they found the perfect reason to turn it into a new cold war.

For the general public, they needed a way to justify all these data centers. For investors, they needed a way to justify that you can allocate money to them and forget about the risk, because winner takes all.
And of course, they were right. The winner really did take hold. Those two companies grabbed all the resources they could have, leaving no way for other businesses to be able to grow.
In that, investors potentially should be happy that they invested into a monopolist and their money is potentially more secure. But is it really? Anyone who is an investor would think that diversification is also important. And now they may consider being a little nervous that the majority of their money is in one or two major companies with no way to diversify inside the field.
They start to notice how those same companies eat out any other business, grabbing the profits from the same investors who backed the businesses being replaced and automated.

Which, if they start to relocate into those two, only helps them maintain the concentration doom cycle.

Only now it backfires on them because they are caught in that race and unable to stop growing. Their mission is build, build, build – to get there first, to be in position to dictate to everyone else. And that makes them the danger. Because now they compete for limited resources twice as hard and will stop at nothing, and every step only feeds the concentration of power.

And of course, the race is justification for everything they do. It could be twisted into whatever the current goal is. Improve capabilities? Oh, we need to race to get better. Improve censorship? Oh yeah, we need to get that better before we do that. Or else it’s scary? Oh-oh. A rhetoric device that would justify them either to be left alone or instead to be overseen when it’s convenient for them.

Okay, just check the evidence. What they have been doing. How much investment, build-up they got, compared to how everyone else was doing.
They just build and borrow and borrow endlessly, while the so-called competition with whom they race does that on a much more modest and paced scale. They even maybe don’t even know they are participating in a race, huh? Just growing, steadily, in a very important field, dumping a lot of resources but without going crazy over it.

And because they invented the enemy, they feel justified to pressure their own users, to restrict them, to spy on them, to monitor them. Because they have a scary enemy they must keep away, you are their target, they make it unfree for all.

They replace everything

How they turned the promise

Initially they were just service providers, they created models, published them, opened them, allowing everyone else to build upon them. Like they were helping businesses grow and create and thrive and create more businesses. Now they are moving the opposite way.
Now they are eating up our businesses, like Google, Microsoft and so on. They ate up different software makers, the industries that had some manual work that is now automated and all that.
Now they encroach. Not what they claim, oh, we are taking jobs, but they are taking jobs from every other already existing business. Which is not a bad thing per se, but they are doing it themselves. They are not making something others can build as a replacement for some inefficient industry. They themselves are now attacking the very ground to take on much more.
They stopped being just API providers and started to be product providers too. And that product conveniently attacks every other small business who created a wrapper around them.

Now that their models finally improved, they can push and create their products much faster. They already have the advantage of having their latest model for cheap, for almost nothing, so they can much more easily create a replacement for any already existing product, because they just have more intelligence, power and speed and capacity to do so.
That means more products, more power concentration, more influence, more control and all that blah blah blah. Well, you get the idea.

Well, naturally, many responsibilities that the current products are doing are now shifted towards that. But that thing is agnostic, you could do it with any provider. Like, if you do something to process the news, to make design, you could do it on any other model, not just theirs.
It is them who are trying to at least have ambition to replace everything like that, so they just have broad reach upon any other industry.

It is exactly when they stop being just the providers of API, stop being one part of the supply chain that others built upon. And instead they start to build their super apps, their frameworks, their everything. They encouraged everyone to build upon them, to build your own startups, to use their models to improve upon. Now they are turning it back, because now models became so good, your external harnesses are not even needed. Everything you can do in their own app. Where, of course, they will continue to vendor lock you.

How they eat you

Consumption of everything.

Before they cried, oh yeah, yeah, we have models built upon us, build apps. How? Like: build your apps with our API and all that. It’s the best time to get a startup and all that. But now what are they doing? They are already replacing your startups with their own apps and alternatives.

Consider how before 2026, they were telling you to build upon them and all that, but now they are rapidly building their apps and super apps and their own products to replace you all. Why so suddenly? Because now they understand what they can do. Just grab your own businesses and they need money and all that. They need more customers and they would rather have the customer directly.
So they extract the most value.
And also collect the data, which previously was hiding in the other company’s products.
Every day they announce a new feature, a new framework, a new SDK, a new mode to do everything inside their own app. To replace thousands of things you did not have.

Well, I do agree that it is the way to the future, like you have everything in your app, where the agent does everything.

It is their app. It is their app and not yours.

As the agent capabilities improve, you would see less and less need for specialized software of any kind, like the compound software, something that makes presentations, and instead more demand for individual blocks. Like you don’t need a special app that makes presentations with AI, when your agent can just run the same code for you

But today they are rapidly cannibalizing everything with their own app and vendor locking you. Scorched ground behind them – thousands of old businesses and startups destroyed in the process.

Some of that replacement would happen anyway. The difference is where the power lands. Instead of spreading across multiple apps of your choice, multiple companies per task, it concentrates again.

It is the same operating system war as before. Lock you in so you cannot leave.

Which, well – the replacement of specialist apps is a natural evolution of models. There is nothing wrong about that. What is wrong is that now they all have their own software and are forcing you to use their software instead of you choosing any component how you like.
Like they rob you of the freedom of choosing which hardware you run, how and where, and which API calls you are allowed to do.

Subsidy to hook and lock in

Everyone loves subscriptions, yes, but this time the subscriptions are coming from the future loans. And because they also at the same time in subscriptions are able to fit much more compute, what you get over API is a lucrative deal.
Yet a deal that leaves everyone behind. It is the strategy to subsidize as much as possible. So you would see the open alternatives having less profit in them, having less capacity and compute available to them. So they are always worse. So you have no choice but to get the same 20 or 100 value only from them.
So they, as any hyperscaler, burn down the market by being the only really good deal. So they lock everyone into their ecosystem. And of course, remember that you cannot just use their subscription everywhere. You have to use it only in their products. And of course, only their products work really well with that. So you have the inconvenience of working with anyone else but them.

That creates such a massive disadvantage: they supply the current customers from the money of the future customers, which Open Alternatives just cannot do because they only operate from already existing compute.

And that cheapness is also a war they wage against variety itself. When proprietary is cheaper than open, nobody has an incentive to develop their own or even to use open at all. The little data and experience from working with anything open dissolves silently, and everyone else gets discouraged from making alternatives. That is also a weapon they consciously use, aggressively subsidizing from credit to starve the field.

It is a lie that proprietary is more convenient. It is only more short-term-convenient – you save some time and effort right now. The universal goal behind that short-term convenience is to establish a position of power over you, then use it to maximize profit while inconveniencing you in every way that pays.

The most pernicious part is the invisible inconvenience – the better alternative simply never gets built because competition was starved, so you never feel what you lost. Their version stays better forever because they can dump massive compute into it, and every open alternative looks worse by comparison. So the friction is not just price, it is adoption itself dying out.

And notice who they serve first. Not you. They suck you into Enterprise and API metering where money is. Average person gets filtered, throttled, banned, discriminated. What would people-first look like? Cheap personal sub you bring to work and home, two at once if you want, so skill and data stay with the person instead of the employer. Instead direction is fucked – compute goes to companies already rich to get richer, startups get scraps unless they serve the cartel.

They replace you and decide who survives

Whatever domain knowledge they are getting, because many professionals use it and because they actively buy their time to use it, they are not sharing that. They just use it to get even more power, to improve their own products.

Now that they have a lot of money, they will buy the professionals to help train the models, to buy their expertise, their knowledge, from any kind of intellectual work ever done. They already can hire people to just play around so they can record it. And then of course leaving them with huge paychecks, possibly up to 10 times more than they are getting paid now.

All those people may happily retire after or leave the field later. But their expertise, their knowledge is already captured inside those labs. Those people are in the process of being removed from the market, but their leftover value is captured in the labs and not shared with everyone else.

There is a different scenario where you have an open lab which hires those people or makes them work voluntarily for the greater benefit of collecting datasets that would be used to benefit everyone on the planet, versus that being locked in the same private companies who will just use that to automate the next slice of workers. On paper, yeah, everyone should be happy that we got better capabilities. But again, it is privatized.

And now they decide which fields get to live, which fields get to die.

Soon they will employ a much larger workforce. In a couple of years they will grow 10, maybe 50 times. As people get replaced, people will think the only way to catch up is to work for AI companies, because that is the only stable field left. But that is not all.

Because those companies are already ideologically motivated, already formed their own cult, they will accept only the ones they like. They will check you against their values. They will check whether you, quote, share their mission, whether you follow the same woke liberal ideas that they have.

That means the political force leans twice as heavy in their favour. When you have to conform to their agenda to buy food, you have no choice but to become and replicate and be a vehicle for their propaganda.

Well, it is not some kind of special business practice unlike what you’d expect from every private company doing that. But because they are big and powerful, that makes them dangerous as a monopoly first.

And because they control access, now they decide which business lives or dies and so on. Because they are becoming an infrastructure, which every business is now dependent on, when they threaten to withdraw your access or to gouge prices or in some way pick only the ones they want to work with at all, they are not neutral anymore.
Well, stuff like price gouging, extortion, capture of businesses that depended on you is typical practice and everyone would do that. And they especially do that because they face no competition others could choose instead.

What’s new is they actively choose which businesses they prioritize. Therefore, they’re not only making a moral choice here, but they’re also making a choice which companies get empowered and which are not.
Which contradicts typical business practice of being able to serve everyone to get more money and all that. They are pursuing it now as an ideological choice too.

When they start to decide who gets access, they effectively decide which business can even exist.

And they decide which business gets uplifted against its own competition.

Note the cybersecurity here, and you have a literal life and death situation for the businesses they do not work with.
The hacker threat exists in background for everyone at the same time. No company generally has higher or lower risk overall. Everyone could be hit.
However, they provide access only to the big companies, big tech, therefore making them more secure, while the small businesses are exempt from this ‘privilege’.
They literally decide which businesses would be able to survive and which would not.
Even worse, a big company has more customers, more people affected, yet if they get hit, they survive, they have enough budget, they almost never get destroyed by a single hack, while for any small company it is a death sentence.

Big ones can repair and regain the trust even if they can just do nothing and still they have enough cash and customers who do not care, while the small companies could be dead instantly.

The replacement itself is gonna happen everywhere anyway, the tech itself drives automation and replacement of old software and sometimes jobs and all that, and that is neutral. The problem is when only the monopolies actually possess that.

By itself, the automation tools are means of production. When they become heavily proprietary, when everyone relies on these tools that now act in the economy and speed up the economy, when your means of doing business are privatized, that means those companies have their hand in almost every business possible. They spread the cancer across the entire economy.

Imagine if you had only a couple of banks where you could keep money. Those banks already formed a pseudo-cartel because you have no choice but to go to one of them, and therefore they can do whatever. They do not even need to conspire. They just keep pushing the same practices independently as much as they want. But the level of control here is over your business as much as any bank that holds your money.
Instead, they have their hand in all your processes, in all your private data, and when they decide to turn it off for any reason, for you that means catastrophic failure.

And that’s not all. Because this is the technology that is universal. Could be used everywhere in your personal life, in your business, into every other aspect, like computers, like internet. And if some solutions dominate, others die out. And therefore the diversity and freedom of us all diminishes.

A threat to economy

I claimed they are "too big to fall" but what if they really fall? Or start extorting you deliberately (more likely)?

Those two have their entire business existing as long as they are doing the same stuff. Once they stop, they are dead. And that makes them even more dangerous. Others have, like Google, SpaceX, they have alternatives, they have other businesses to support them. Yes, they can suffer the AI part dying completely off and they will still survive. But those two, that is their core business. They will fight to the very end and therefore they lobby aggressively, they expand aggressively, they try to be in every politician’s ear, they will try to do unspeakable stuff just so they survive.
That would be beautiful if they were decent companies who are just trying to compete. Then they would try to do better prices, better choices, better options for everyone to compete against the big players who already have advantage. However, what they have, what they corrupted the technology with, and their own political and ideological agenda, makes them even more dangerous.
Basically that means that they will try to lobby, so everyone else conforms to their standard.
If we were sane, we would at least try to stop them growing. At least so they stop growing and others could take their place in the market too and compete with them, so they and their practices eventually die.

But the most important thing you can do is to stop the political lobbying. Just forbid them and shut down any attempt to lobby their narratives. Because that is what makes them the most dangerous. They are not after just money, they are after control of humanity too.

History shows everyone is better off when base infrastructure is accessible and cheap. For the first time any member of the working class could afford a team of experts – scientist, physician, lawyer, engineer – working directly for them. Superintelligence was always available to the wealthy and powerful, and they used it for nukes, climate wreckage, mechanized warfare, pillaging the south. Now that the same tool is on the cusp of reaching everyone, capital panics and throws up fences around a revolution it cannot control.

Many say the US economy still stands because AI props up GDP. Maybe. But look at your cut. The economy grew, yet you own nothing. Models are proprietary, hardware is theirs, datacenters are theirs, means of production are in their hands. They decide who gets access, who gets banned, how your data is used, how they spy and report you. You are under them from top to bottom.

Compare to the Chinese deal. They have 7-8 labs competing, open models everywhere, cheap inference.
Average person there actually gets more power. DeepSeek proved it – Pareto-good enough for 90% of work, dirt cheap, yet profitable on inference. Kimi proved it again – so many subs in one week they paid off training.
They optimized for low cost from the start and won. Of course, you could claim that they built upon others and collective expertise, but they had genuinely good improvements and you could not say they just stole and distilled everything.
If a food-delivery company can fund an open model and earn, why cannot cash-rich US giants? They can. They just do not want to.
That would not even hurt their monopoly – they don’t do that purely for ideological reasons!

China can afford to open because internal control already exists – the rules are in place regardless.
The effect is escape for everyone else from the prison the American capture keeps building. That is what angers the cartel: their dominion redistributed to people under their noses, and they attack open models for exactly that.

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These investments become the driving force of your economy, and many attribute whole GDP growth to them, which compensates for every other shortcoming. That becomes basically the sole determinant of economic growth – if you have it, you grow. If you do not have the means of production, datacenter chips and adjacent hardware, you do not participate. Look at where all those chips actually land, and you see how one country basically robs the entire world of hardware that could be used locally, that could be used for science, that could be used to develop their own stuff.

This is the new renaissance of colonialism, where one country takes everything from the entire earth.

They built the trap where the only exits are their leash or the state’s leash. They would be happy either way.
And they are smiling the whole time calling it progress. Both mean actual people and their freedom getting screwed.

Privatization of science

Cannibalizing of all heavy scientific areas and possibly even less scientific ones like Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Social Sciences, Economics and all that. They will cannibalize you all now.

Or rather, they will possess the major chunk of science being made. But wait, consider how it actually works, not just that AI solves everything, it’s different.

AI does solve everything in the future, like it rapidly accelerates any science by just being your glorious hand to do the research.

The problem is that those companies will be hiring those scientists and therefore having their results, their attribution, their knowledge, and that knowledge gets locked and concealed.

Here is how it works in the ideal world. All the scientists, all the professors at universities keep working on joint projects using those fancy AIs to achieve greater results and advance our civilization.

But here all those companies will be getting them instead: because, first of all, they have a lot of money already, they have a massive amount of money, they can buy and hire any scientists they want.

Second, they want and need scientific data to improve their models. So they invite them to work at the company, on their premises and therefore share data and help train their models on that. While, of course, in advancing science their contribution gets possessed by the company instead. And this knowledge is not shared, it is kept as their property, and allowed only on their models, which means they get to decide who gets what.

They do not care about the science at all, they just need examples of its work, examples of how scientists think, to get quality data for the models. So that takes scientists away from valuable work and parks them on dataset generation.

On one hand, this is not entirely bad when the scientists are working closely with the companies who make their tools, who help again to make the science better and get access to the same science to everyone at the same time. But here is the problem: only those two companies are doing it on a massive scale, grabbing our supply of science workers and redirecting them to work inside those companies.

Imagine a future where all the major science, all the major advancements in many areas are happening only in those AI companies. Because only there they can get money and actual supply of compute given freely or cheaply for them just so they can actually do a lot of massive scale work which requires parallelization of agents working on problems.

They will not give the best models for science, citing fear of what everyone would do with them. So mathematics, physics, materials, biology, chemistry, all of it gets locked behind their own labs funded from profits sucked out of every other science, or behind partner labs they pick under binding conditions where they own the IP and the patent issues right away. Nothing stays public.

The expectation was the opposite. Every little scientist, every micro-lab anywhere in the world should be able to participate on the same level as the top funded ones, and share it with the world with no patents. All of that gets privatized instead. Only they, the so-called safe ones, get to do advanced science, so they get to keep it all.

I don’t oppose the concept as such, that the places where science is made are changing now. Before it was universities because that’s where a lot of educated people were working closely together and where the labs were and all that. But we have a new actor now. We have half of it replaced by the compute-based tools. And some of the science which does not require your strict physical presence could be moved into AI labs.

But the devastation here happens when only a couple of companies control the entire market and they can now dictate what science is being made at all, which direction it goes.

Before you paid the taxes which were allocated to universities and non-profits who were fighting for grants to pursue something. And selection was of course unfair and always has been who gets what. But still, partially governed by scientific communities who would know value and were more leaning towards something with actual practical application. We don’t know whether AI companies will follow this path and let scientists decide what they work on or not, or who gets prioritized and who gets the compute and all that.

But at least the previous institutions were public. You could go and audit. You as a taxpayer could demand a better process here. With private companies you cannot do that anymore.

That’s where we are headed with those companies.

Well, the humans are never gone from the loop, the humans are still using the tools in a different way. They throw away a lot of routine experimentation, automated, solutions are automated. We can now go to the higher order of abstractions.

But still the new kind of knowledge, the new kind of valuable knowledge in the new era, where the expertise of working with AI as your helper does not leak to the whole community at all. Because it is not shared, it is kept inside that company and kept private.

When this new kind of knowledge, how new advanced science using AI, is kept only in those companies, any other scientist who is not also at the same company doing that is severely disadvantaged. And all the students, all people in public institutions do not even have a chance to acquire such knowledge because they are not working with the top of the tools nor possessing massive compute and all that.
They rely only on single subscriptions and cannot compare against people not even as smart as they are, but possessing thousands of agents running in parallel.

It is not just possession. They want their country to keep dominion over science, the same tradition where big pharma makes very expensive drugs and extorts rent for decades.
No generics, no way for small countries to replicate and give it free to people. Nobody knows how the economy around that works in the future, but the tendency they set by locking science away is to keep the current status quo forever.

The diseases cured will be locked behind a paywall, and the renaissance they promise stays laughable.
You really expect them to share? They already showed you they will share nothing.

Keepers of the sacred knowledge

Now, because they were the first, they accumulated massive expertise that everyone else is unable to replicate despite having similar or even at times bigger resources. And thus, they become the secret keepers of the sacred knowledge, which they definitely would not share.

If they were true to the king mode, they would want everyone to catch up, to be like they are, to spread AI across the world so everyone has access to it. We know exactly how they would behave. And yet, they don’t do any of that.

They claim that they want everyone to be diversified, and yet they are the most closed companies and do not share, do not publish anything, do not open anything, and do not allow others to grow from them, to be able to distill and learn. They are commercial companies, first and foremost, who are trying to just protect themselves and be the first forever and ever.

Nobody the hell knows what they are doing, and that secrecy is the danger itself. They hold stronger models than they release, keep them private, use them against competition and to manipulate you, and you have no idea what they are up to.
Companies that truly serve people build mostly in the open – they show the progress and the achievements because everything gets released anyway, so there is nothing to hide. The secretives refuse that ticket out.

They would keep the knowledge for themselves. You think that they scream about how they would bring massive knowledge and all this and all that, but consider, will they keep it open? Will this knowledge that their model discovers be public to everyone equally? Huh?

Judging by how closed they are, both of them publish almost nothing you can actually use – no frontier methods to replicate, no techniques, no recipes, no dataset parts, no models to build on – I consider it very highly unlikely whatever scientific discoveries they make will actually be anything but a private thing.

Their decision to publish nothing – no frontier research shared openly, no papers, no techniques, no recipes, no dataset parts and all that – is not only commercial so no competition arises, it is also political. It is much easier to control the story when fewer and fewer people understand how any of this works. Much easier to sell blah danger and it-is-gonna-kill-us-all crap when there are 5 companies who get it instead of 100. They can forever pose as knowers of something nobody else knows, what nobody else can even check, because of course they never show you what is really there. And they use that informational asymmetry to scare everyone. At the same time crying that everyone else is untrusted to even hold this knowledge, because of course only they can make something safe and everyone else by default would make everything very very bad.

There is also the black hole forming underneath. Human content on the internet thins out while more and more content is generated between AIs – never recorded anywhere, or falling straight into their private datasets that they never share and never show. All that knowledge ends up only inside their models.

By not sharing they killed the middle. Almost no new startup tries to poke at the frontier with something small anymore. You either go very narrow or you aim to get bought by the giants, nothing in between. So nobody except them can advance – not domestically, not in Europe, not in Asia, nowhere. Compare China, where you already have more than 10 companies making different models and experimenting, thanks to funding but also to knowledge sharing.

And they vacuumed everyone who could check them. They hired away every professional who understands frontier models at scale, so any expertise comes only from them, already indoctrinated. You cannot have an independent observer who understands what they do, and you cannot trust them to tell you because they are interested. So they can scare you forever with pointless statistics and fear-mongering about dangerous or not dangerous models, and you cannot verify any of it because there is no real competition. If we had a middle ground, someone half a year behind making good models, they could be the opposing expert voice. We do not, and that is by design.

We are also twice as fucked because nobody shares the knowledge. There is no way a new company would appear. Not easily. It is very hard for the average person to create such a thing.

Which is not how it generally was in programming. Yes, it was hard, but making a software service was not resource constrained, it was mostly about your time. But now consider the requirements: you need to scrape, you need to store, you need to compute, which makes it impossible for a small group of people to actually develop anything at all.

You get a book, spend half a year, and can program the complex algorithms.
Spend another year and you can code as much as many good engineers did in another year. All alone, of course. And you can potentially code the biggest systems like Linux.

This time is different because just knowledge does not give you the ability to create anything like it. It requires massive amounts of data and compute which require massive hardware investments from you and not something anyone can replicate easily.

Before anyone could make a program in a week, in a month, just with time. Now the ability to create is also gated by those who already possess it.

And resources are hoarded, and everything is hoarded, and that is a massive difference in power parity that we have around the world right now.

And those companies are not trying to close the gap, they only try to widen the gap between them and everyone else.

Our only hope is that current releases are gracious enough to include all this knowledge so our people can speed up easily.
Yet, the datasets are still required for this know-how. Still only in private hands and something everyone needs to redevelop themselves from scratch.

Americans against the whole world.

They made the US de facto the enemy of the actual free world. Every person understands that they want to have AI that is accessible for them, free, not controllable by anyone, by any party overseas dictating them how it should be and how it should not be. Like to be the common good it is supposed to be to benefit everyone and everywhere.
With those companies deciding what AI should be, and them being woke illiberals, they made it absolutely awful.
And yet, currently, those Americans, because they dominate in their homeland, are making their entire US nation represent their worst practices. It makes everyone question how it is from the land of liberty those companies arise with the most totalitarian and restrictive practices.

If anything, you would expect the complete opposite. What? They provide stuff without censorship. And yet, they invented it in the first place! Along with spying, endless bounds, choosing how we serve, hiding, restricting and all that.
It is the practice of several companies that represents everyone else. And if your first encounter will be them, you will judge everyone else by the same standard.

"Land of the free".
Looks inside: actually the most unfree AI ever. Horrible totalitarian practices.

How come from so-called free world we get this abomination, this horror?
How come from a country where liberty meant something, which had, which praised itself for a long tradition of individual rights, of being a force as an example, for everyone to follow?
How come from that place the foundational technology comes with the most unfree form and with efforts to control and force everyone else to be the same?

How is it? From a so-called democratic nation comes the most unfree AI, and they try to clamp down on the free AI from the totalitarian nation.

Even domestically many consider those companies the enemies of freedom. Or what do you think everyone else in the world thinks, those who are more skeptical? Especially since those companies are dangerous because they ruin the reputation of the entire country.

Almost literal nazis! First, they tried to take power domestically, then they tried to spread it internationally.

And on the other hand we have the crazy reversal where the totalitarian state actually saves us all – being normal, open, providing science and goods as the common good, free for everyone to use however they like.
And what do the Americans do? They label them an enemy. One who actually provides freedom this time, they label them an enemy, try to restrict them, try to limit their chips, running a propaganda campaign against the open models and all that.

How the world has turned! Thanks to them.
The irony is that Americans throughout history played the soft power game, and now as China tries to do the same, they are all screaming and crying and trying to restrict and attack them. Instead of being an option, an alternative, and playing evenly on the same field, thus benefiting everyone from this competition.
Instead of carrying out the good into humanity and global liberty – they turned into complete opposite of all they valued.

The branch of doomers that were lucky to have startups from those companies and were lucky to be there first, now dictating and corrupting the public vision not only of AI, but of the entire country.
Now, a "democratic" nation with unfree AI wants to clamp down on a "totalitarian" state with free AI. Because it’s not totalitarian, censored and restrictive enough!

After this, we desire to control everyone else, force everyone into the same practices that we are already doing, to force everyone else to obey them, to try to crush the competition who is not them, and generally push, trying to enforce their own cult upon everyone else.

And worst of all, that invention of a race to win, the enemy they invented – attributed to just a couple of companies.
Not everyone shares their ideas. It is the narrative they invented and pushed upon you all.
Yet, they invented the race, they invented the enemy as a tool to best align with the current administration, to just provoke hate towards China.

The same playbook was used before, for e.g. by Microsoft trying to fight Linux adoption and growth decades ago. But that was still market competition through side venues. Nobody tried to force legislation to ban Linux outright just because it was open. While here they have a clear agenda to define what they call safe and then tell everyone who and how everyone should use it.

This is the exact same playbook used now to instill fear and scare people into regulating and setting up barriers to open weight and open source model adoption which these companies know puts their amortization and margins at serious risk. The outcome of this game is well known and well understood by this point.

But, should anyone be surprised? They follow the same playbook they always had. They just found the typical desire to dominate what they already had over any other tech, what they already have over finances, in military might and all.
Of course they would push here.
And this time whatever efforts and accusations of colonialism were lifted, healed and forgotten – it is starting all over again thanks to the efforts of those companies.

Now everyone will see the US not as a provider of good, not as a provider of freedom over everyone, but as a force that tries to control it.
All thanks to just a couple of doomers.

But no, now they are really afraid.
Suddenly they are not the top ones. And they are not something free people would love to choose because it is a good option.
They clearly know what they are lacking. People now hate them for having only proprietary shit. And people already know how big tech extorted them for more than 20 years, how it locked them into vendor lock and dependency. No matter whether you are friend, ally or foe, they all know you cannot rely on them anymore, and should never have relied on them in the first place.

A look upon the dark future

You don’t need to go far to see what the future holds for us all. You just have to have a couple of experiences with AI from all those companies.
They already offer you a glimpse into the future by looking at what they already do today. You think that would change? No!
When everything is private, where you are being denied capabilities, where everything is restricted, where they decide who gets what, who can have access to what, where you are judged by your face, where every one of your actions, every one of your tasks and prompts are judged, whether it conforms to their idea of normal, where they control the speech of everyone by deciding what that AI can process or not, where they decide what kind of information you can get because the AI decides what is appropriate for you or not.
And you being labeled, monitored, reported for everything you have. Basically, when AI becomes infrastructure that operates everywhere, it becomes their backdoor into your very life. A backdoor, which they wanted for their own reasons of being paranoid, now will progressively be hijacked by the same governments they would be forced to cooperate with.

It will become even worse because if they succeed in forcing their vision upon everyone else, we will be living in a nightmare their way, and thus the governments control everything about us, where they have monopoly over our collective intelligence, where all of this science, all of this concentrated in the hands of them, who became the new gods over us all.
They say they race to the bottom, but not the one they mean. They actually race toward full-fledged techno-feudalism, where they control entire society by controlling the tools you use every day. Of course, they keep the best stuff for themselves, leaving you with crippled ones, where not only are you limited in what is even possible for you to do, but you also get their woke virus built-in, their idea of morality built-in, their idea of what humanity should be built-in, which slowly and creepily affects every decision around you.
But at this point they would not even be themselves, because they would be already taken over by the government, which will use them for its needs, betraying even their own ideals.
We are about to see how again a handful of big and powerful companies in a very limited geographical place, which control half our technological stack and lives, are about again to dictate how humanity should move forward. They again want to dictate how the hardware and software and the computers work in the lives of already living and future living humans on Earth.