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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get it. There are multiple providers. I cancel one provider and sign up for someone new in a few minutes when I feel like changing. I’ve been doing this every few months.

I think the only people worried about lock-in or Black Mirror themes are the people who are thinking about these subscriptions in an abstract sense.

It’s really easy to change providers. They’re all improving. Competition is intense.

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In the early days of the Web, competition was intens in Search Engine market but eventually one of them won the competition and became the only viable option. I expect this will happen to AI as well. In future only one AI company will dominate the market and people will have no choice but to use it.

I'm seeing quite a few people on this site recently talking about their Kagi subscriptions, claiming it is sufficiently better than Google to be worth the money.

This site is not all representative of the average internet user though

The same, in theory, applies to social media. But they've all enshittified in very similar ways now that they've captured their audiences. In theory there is intense competition between Meta, Twitter, TikTok, etc, but in actuality the same market forces drive the same enshittification across all of those platforms. They have convergent interests. If they all force more ads and suggested posts on you, they all make more money and you have no where to go.

People are reasonably worried that the same will happen to AI.

> The same, in theory, applies to social media.

It absolutely does not.

Your use of social network derives value from your network. If you switch, you have to convince everyone else to switch as well.

It's a tremendous barrier to switching.

LLMs are for the most part interchangeable commodity.

Note that the comment you are replying to is speculating about the (not so distant) future. Be assured that companies will try their best to lock customers in.

One option is to add adverts to the generated output, and making the product cheaper than the competition. Another is to have all your cloud data preprocessed with LLMs in a non-portable way, so that changing will incur a huge cost.

More and more of the social networks are just the algorithm though - tiktok, X, Facebook, etc. How much of your feed does the average use personally know now?

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