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Comment by cyanydeez | Hacker News Reader

ok, but the valid business prop is to be a dependent on anthropic, indistinguishable from just being a second class citizen, since your entire networth can't be extracted from anthropic.

Go nuts with it, but we're at the SciFi dystopia test with: how do mega corporations even form? Well, this is certainly the plausible reality, they just start aggregating random income streams because their product is essentially the only thing that makes the business profitable. Without it, it can't compete.

Hopefully this sounds skeptical, but I don't see how you can have an independent business and be entirely dependent on third party for your operations.

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There is no such thing as an "independent company". They are all dependent on the federal government to protect them from the marauding herds.

Except PMCs.

> I don't see how you can have an independent business and be entirely dependent on third party for your operations.

All businesses are reliant on multiple third parties doing their thing in order for the business to be viable. A lot of companies exist at the whims of Amazon or Walmart.

Not intellectually.

> I don't see how you can have an independent business and be entirely dependent on third party for your operations

This isn't new though. A ton of software companies are already completely dependent on AWS or Azure or whatever.

>> I don't see how you can have an independent business and be entirely dependent on third party for your operations

Like a lumber mill that buys logs from a logging company? Who subcontracts to individual fallers? Who buy their chainsaws from a chainsaw company, their fuel from a petrochemical company? No business isn't entirely dependent on third parties. That's what it means to exist in a healthy economy.

A "farm-to-table" megacorp that owns everything from the source of every raw material through to the finished product is a nightmare, an entity that needs to be reigned in and broken up. Capitalism is a competitive game, but a game that can never be allowed to end.

But what about the digital economy? It's interesting that the length of the supply chain for digital goods and knowledge work is nothing like physical goods. Google, Microsoft, and Apple are end to end, don't have to depend on any other software company if they don't want to (until LLMs, anyway, except Google).

What is a "digital economy"? There is only one economy as far as I know. Division of company inputs into software and non-software is arbitrary and has no merit as far as I can see.

>> don't have to depend on any other software company if they don't want to.

I am rather sure that Google is heavily reliant on Microsoft and Apple to produce the operating systems used on devices that are in turn used to view Google's ads. And Microsoft is heavily reliant on hardware manufacturers (firmware is also software) to make the machines that Windows lives inside. And Apple is reliant upon a thousand and one companies that enable the innumerable mobile networks, which include many layers of non-apple software.

They are not reliant on them second-to-second. If anthropic tells these businesses they can't use anymore, or price hike, or ... then those businesses are kaput, right that second.

Plus you can bet your firstborn everything passes through the NSA first. So seems like a spectacularly bad idea, especially for .eu business.

There's no "right this second" way to kaput Google, not even if you're Microsoft.

The difference is that the lumber mill isn't giving the logging company all the information required to run a lumber mill and the logging company isn't turning around and selling said information to anyone for $200/mo.

In my scenario, the only way anthropic and openai are profitable entities if they directly absorb the capacities of the companies, the same way Amazon "basics" exist to absorb the generic consumer product levels.

I'm not pointing out they'll take your secrets and sell them to the competition. I'm pointing out they will _be_ your competition. The same way Amazon basics competes with it's business interests.

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