Yeah, I think grandparent has a point, but at the same time, Google Search also didn't have a strong moat, or at least not one that couldn't be replicated in a few years, and it still positively dominated the market for decades.
When the price is $0, the competitor has to be substantially better for consumers to switch. Bing reached quality comparable to Google, but never noticeably exceeded it. So people didn't switch. OTOH, the switch from Netscape -> IE6 -> Firefox -> Chrome did happen.
But when the price is non-zero, that gives another dimension to compete on, and monopolies without significant barriers are much less common. It looks like good LLM's are going to have a price tag, so a monopoly is going to need a moat.
Dominated market sure, able to charge any kind of subscription fee no.
If winning the LLM’s game long term means the product needs to compete on cost and be the best to win, that’s not going to be nearly as profitable in the near term.
