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Roman Belaire's avatar

Interesting perspective, David! I'll push back on one or two things, first, that corporations are thinking in decades instead of quarters. The VC structure in Silicon Valley prioritizes time-to-market over all else, which leads to what we see in OpenAI: initial fundamental research, but a complete shutoff of fundamental research after 2021-22 when ChatGPT began to yield results. In the scientific community, we call them "ClosedAI". You also mentioned Google/Deepmind as another example, but they similarly halted publications for a long while during the rollout of Gemini. A good example you can point to would be Meta/FAIR, which is leading the open-source AI movement to everyone's surprise.

I'm curious if you have any clarity on how to achieve both technological supremacy and public self-determination. By definition, monopolies lack the second, but public institutions are too broke to be "cathedrals of innovation" (love that term, by the way). Intentionally designed, case-by-case regulation allowing companies with good intentions to pool resources into basic research sounds like a great way forward, but I fear Congress lacks the attention span and ideological nuance to achieve anything close to that.

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James's avatar

Interesting read, but it leans more toward a clever contrarian take than a grounded analysis. It paints monopolies as misunderstood engines of progress without really grappling with how concentrated power tends to play out—through regulatory capture, labor suppression, and gatekeeping. The binary between “chaotic competition” and “benevolent monopoly” feels overly neat.

There’s also this quiet assumption that we should move on from public institutions—as if the answer to inefficiency is just to hand the reins to private monopolies. But looking around at hype-driven markets and platform bloat, it’s hard to see that as a reliable path forward.

Corporate innovation clearly has a place. But we also need to rebuild trust in institutions that are meant to serve the public, not scrap them entirely. Letting go of that project just shifts more power to actors who answer to no one but shareholders—and that’s not the same thing as progress.

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