What we are seeing starting to evolve is a deeply distorted market.
If you do anything to prevent that, that would be a less free market. By definition.
Free markets have nothing to do with a market having healthy competition and sane behavior. Free markets in fact reward you with doing absurd things that fuck with prices to make your bag.
It is entirely the point of the free market that Micron can decide that selling all memory to only Anthropic is a better distribution of their resources and you can go pound sand if you can't find any memory any more.
So yes, monopolizing all silicon in the world and then demanding you pay them for using it is literally a free market.
Free markets trend torwards monopolies and other market failures without intervention excepting very specific markets that have genuinely mostly fungible products that are easy to sell, which we call commodities, and even those can in fact become failed markets like what once happened with onions.
If you think this can't be a free market because it's in a bad place for you personally, you don't understand market theory.
Free markets are also free to become "distorted" as you say.
I'm also not saying Claude can't have their own terms.
But when government and private enterprise meet, we have problems.
The government—supposedly acting as and agent of the people but largely acting in the name of a more nebulous "national defense"—has the power to kingmake private companies that can act outside the normal checks and balances of those people, and in a way that distorts the normal market dynamics that would otherwise give people the power to vote with their dollar.
In other words, we lose the vote on both sides.
> Free markets trend torwards monopolies
Where did you pick this up? In a perfect market you'd see fewer monopolies, not more. Monopolies occur when there is some other force undermining meaningful competition.
In some rare cases, that can be e.g. unique talent or culture, which prevents other talent from cohering well enough to compete. (E.g. pacifists make poor arms dealers.)
But usually it's a) resources (e.g. geography for some scarce material) or—far more likely—it's b) distortion due to government intervention, or worse, c) corrupt government intervention.
2. Which frontier AI leaders are demanding they are the only place to run inference?
2. I think that was OpenAI this time. But maybe it was Anthropic.
> if you haven't seen the whole ram supply thing…
1. I've read about RAM supply, but I've also actually taken a look at shops and silicon is still for sale, so I am not sure how the claim is defensible - how are you quantifying it? And for "all of the silicon in the world"? And how much for non-frontier AI, and how much silicon for non-AI? (For what it's worth, Google AI says the claim is false.)
> demand they be the only place to run inference
2. I searched but can't find such a quote from any company - perhaps the quote was made up by a site in order to push an anti-AI viewpoint? Or what is the exact quote you are referring to? (For what it's worth, Google AI also says that claim is false too.)
2. If I made broad claims here that you both believed to be untrue and you'd tried to research and the only stuff you found showed they were lies (and 6 comment levels later, a supporting quote had still not been provided), would you argue that showed I was arguing in good faith?
3. My parent comment even specifically allowed that when you said "all the silicon in the world" you may not have meant what you said, and instead you only meant one specific sub-type of silicon in one specific sub-area of the world. If we changed your claim from "all the silicon in the world" to "one specific sub-type of silicon in a small region of the world", would your claim then be true? If so, what kind and where?
4. Is the idea that pointing out where a broad claim may actually be untrue should not be done? Is there a specific better comment that you believe would have better responded to your original claims about "demand they be the only place to run inference" and "all the silicon in the world"? I am open to hearing the specific reply you suggest.
5. But here, let's go with the idea that 6 levels in we are still assuming there is no bad faith. What is the good faith basis / quote on top of which to view "demand they be the only place to run inference" as being true?