It reminds me of what went down with Netflix. At first, it looked like you only needed one subscription to watch everything, but now that other players have entered the market, with their own bussiness contacts we're seeing ecosystems fracture.

For example, Microsoft is collecting data from services A, B, and C, while Google is gathering data from X, Y, and Z. And when it comes to language models, you might use GPT for some tasks and Llama or Bard for others. It seems like the fight ahead won't be about technology, but rather about who has access to the most useful dataset.

Personally, I also think we'll see competitors trying to take legal action against each other soon.

1) Not every use cases will require the full power and (probably) considerable cost of chat GPT-4.

2) some companies can absolutely not use OpenAI tools simply because they are American and online. A competitor might emerge to capture that market and be allowed to grow to be "good enough"

3) some "countries" (think China or EU(who am I Kidding)) will limit their growth until local alternatives are available. Ground breaking technology have a tendency to spread globally and the current state of the art is not that expensive (we are talking single digit billions once)

Google have really been caught with their pants down here.

Remember that OpenAI was created specifically to stave off the threat of AI monopolization by Google (or anyone else - but at the time Google).

DeepMind have done some interesting stuff with Go, Protein folding etc, but nothing really commercial, nor addressing their reason d'etre of AGI.

Google's just-released ChatGPT competitor, Bard, seems surprisingly weak, and meantime OpenAI are just widening their lead. Seems like a case of the small nimble startup running circles around the big corporate behemoth.

I don't see much of a moat currently, or even developer lockin. The current APIs, and this new plugin architecture are dead simple.