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Comment by NormalGoat | Hacker News Reader

It's basically the same reason why Apple didn't create every app in the App Store. No single company can be specialised in everything, and more importantly, selling tokens is risk-free money since they get a cut for every app without taking any business risk.

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I think that’s a different argument. Apple absolutely “copies” hugely successful, durable apps. Just read about “getting sherlocked”. The rest of the apps are transient, niche and it’s easier to just harvest your cut of ads/payments.

Fair point about Sherlocking, but that's actually proves the analogy. Apple only "Sherlocks" broad, consumer-facing features, but they never touch specialised B2B or super niche software. AI model providers are doing the same thing. They build the broad stuff themselves, like AI inside Excel or PowerPoint, but they live the crazy stuff to other companies.

> They build the broad stuff themselves, like AI inside Excel or PowerPoint

Didnt OpenAI build a browser not just AI inside a browser?

> No single company can be specialised in everything

Not everything, but a company can be specialized in a lot of different things, Samsung for example, or megacorp in Japan.

Yeah, actually trying to specialize in everything constraints the firm's growth. Though diversifying can always bring some much-needed revenue like you said with Samsung or Tata in India.

Or amazon that can undercut any merchant on their platform by cross financing the losses by selling more aws servers.

That’s the other side of diversification: undercutting your competition until they go out of business. Then prices are raised again.

Yeah Amazon is another example I mean they do a lot of things too. AWS has changed software and Amazon prime which is a vehement competitor to Netflix and disney+ market share.

I thought the agents were largely autonomous, and should replace workers?

If labor is not your constraint, you wouldn't be diverting your specialization.

The G in AGI suggests that not being specialised is the point.

The real reason is the models just aren't good enough.

Running a single successful fully automated business at scale would be a huge milestone and a legendary PR achievement, but the tech just isn't there yet.

Best I can do is Rust rewrites take it or leave it

I believe this is the correct answer. You can't run 100 businesses because each one would only receive 1/100 of your attention, and they would all perform poorly.

But that’s the gist of the question, can’t their internal frontier models provide that infinite attention? That is what their PR implies.

> No single company can be specialised in everything

A machine with infinite attention and infinite knowledge probably could specialize in everything.

I wonder what is stopping apple from cloning the top ten apps in each category using AI and then booting the original developers off the app store.

Good morals.

Apple is absolutely doing this for apps that they think are worth copying, there's no morals there.

idk they’ve created the most used and differentiating apps though

They aren't in the top 10 for either free or paid apps.

https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts/36

That actually makes me wonder if Apple apps are not included because they come pre-installed.

i am referring to imessage, camera, photos, facetime, and so on

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