Ben Thompson on the economic imperative of frontier labs:

"To that end, it has long been clear to me that the frontier labs have the economic imperative to move closer to the user.

If you own the user touchpoint, then you have meaningful lock-in, and the best way to own the user touchpoint is to be the canvas for everything they need to do.

This, by extension, means that the frontier labs are on a collision course with software companies: it's software that owns the user touchpoint, and it's in the frontier labs' long-term interest to not simply be a commodity input into software but to simply replace software outright."

(Emphasis mine.)

He quotes Nadella positioning against this:

"The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see.

If all the value is accrued by only a few models, the political economy will simply not tolerate it.

There is no societal permission for an AI future that hollows out entire industries.

Think about what happened in the first phase of globalization where entire industrial economies were hollowed out by outsourcing.

The GDP numbers looked fine on the surface, but the displacement was real and the consequences are still being felt.

Let us not bring that dynamic into the AI era, with a small number of AI systems capturing all the economic returns, while entire industries find their knowledge commoditized right out from underneath them."

If you told me 15 years ago I'd be aligned with Microsoft's worldview, I'd have told you you were crazy!