> As long the tactics are legal ( i.e. not corporate espionage, bribes etc), the no holds barred full free market competition is the best thing for the market and the consumers.

The implicit assumption here is that we have constructed our laws so skillfully that the only path to win a free market competition is by producing a better product, or that all efforts will be spent doing so. This is never the case. It should be self-evident from this that there is a more productive way for companies to compete and our laws are not sufficient to create the conditions.

The consumers are getting huge wins.

Model costs continue to collapse while capability improves.

Competition is fantastic.

> The consumers are getting huge wins.

However, the investors currently subsidizing those wins to below cost may be getting huge losses.

Yes, but that's the nature of the game, and they know it.

> Model costs continue to collapse

And yet RAM prices are still sky high. Game consoles are getting more expensive, not cheaper, as a result. When will competition benefit those consumers? Or consumers of desktop RAM?

The free market has simply decided these consumers are not as relevant as the others.

Maybe the free market is wrong.

It can’t be. Those uses are suboptimal, hence the users aren’t willing to pay the new prices.

Not really. Investors with hundreds of billions of dollars have decided it. The process by which capital has been allocated the way it has isn't some mathematically natural or optimal thing. Our market is far from free.

Saying "investors with hundreds of billions decided it" makes it sound like a few people just chose the outcome, when in reality prices and capital move because millions of consumers, companies, workers, and smaller investors keep making choices every day. Big investors only make money if their decisions match what people actually want; they can't just command success. If they guess wrong, others profit by allocating money better, so having influence isn't the same as having control.

The system isn't mathematically perfect, but that doesn't make it arbitrary. It works through an evolutionary process: bad bets lose money, better ones gain more resources.

Any claim that the outcome is suboptimal only really means something if the claimant can point to a specific alternative that would reliably do better under the same conditions. Otherwise critics are mostly just expressing personal frustration with the outcome.

Sure, it can be beneficial. But don't forget that externalities are a thing.

in the short term maybe, in the long term it depends how many winners you have. If only two, the market will be a duopoly. Customers will get better AI but will have zero power over the way the AI is produced or consumed (i.e. cO2 emission, ethics, etc will be burnt)

> how many winners ... duopoly

There aren't any insurmountable large moats, plenty of open weight models that perform close enough.

> CO₂ emissions

Different industry that could also benefit from more competition ? Clean(er) energy is not even more expensive than dirty sources on pure $/kWh, we still do need dirty sources for workloads like base demand, peakers etc that the cheap clean sources cannot service today.

Yes, but not cutthroat competition that implies unsustainable, detrimental competition that kills off the industry.