They have, but they are not in charge. Apple’s goal is to make money; everything else comes as an afterthought.

I’m not so sure – YouTube is much larger than you might think. It’s not the video platform you grew up with anymore. No one in this world can match the backlog and content density/diversity of YouTube, not even all streaming services combined. People complaining that YouTube is dying because a few YouTubers “retire” from their main gig or that it’s not the same anymore don’t understand how YouTube works. They might not comprehend that the time of their “bubble” has come to an end. When this happens, there are already five new bubbles/niches that are even bigger, and you might not have heard of them, but they are more successful than their “predecessor.” The old bubble is still there to consume in the backlog. Someday in the future, AI will have a field day with the data accumulated via YouTube.

It is transforming, for sure, but I don’t think it will destroy itself completely. In a sense, you can say it will destroy whatever view you had of YouTube as a platform because it is not what it once was.

To my knowledge, YouTube will hit the billion-user milestone this year (Netflix currently at ~250 million paid users). If we look at other data trends from streaming services, it suggests that YouTube will grow more over the coming years. I don’t know how anyone can match YouTube as a whole. In certain niches, sure, but as a whole, it would be like fighting windmills. There’s a reason no one tries to tackle YouTube as a platform and only goes for certain niches.

I mean, if I were an investor looking at this, I would also get excited about making this change - much less risk, less cost, less customer support, etc., all for basically the same output in revenue. In other words, if I cut the small business (6% of value but over 100k accounts to handle) out of the model, I can make more money because the cost reduction is higher than the loss of revenue. And in the long run, when “big game customers” jump ship, I just downsize some more. I also don’t need to invest but can be sure it will generate a certain amount of revenue, as long as I do not squeeze the relevant customer groups too hard. This strategy is very feasible and relatively risk-free. I am not a fan of it, but I think a lot of software companies will go this way after they establish themselves in a market.

Well, I hope you are right. xd

It just seems to me like a monopolization of the market by the big tech corps, which won’t be beneficial to the majority, but at least a few billionaires will get richer.

I was recently invited to the Google research center where they presented their new AI assistant features, which should be coming this year. It was weird; it was at the same time more capable than I thought and more restrictive than one would assume. It’s like not even Google knows exactly what to do with it, or what it should be able to do, or what exactly it is capable of. I also once got to try an “uncensored” / “unrestricted” information model, which was actually a bit scary but far more useful than any of the current “restricted” chatbots. I’m sure AI will change things up, but how, when, and why I don’t know, and the more I find out, the more unsure I am about predictions, besides the one that big corps will try to monopolize the market.

The funny thing is, copyright doesn’t even matter; at least half of the world’s market couldn’t care less about copyright, especially if it’s from the “west.” They certainly won’t suddenly start respecting copyright law. They will use and develop AI without the restriction of copyright. All this talk about copyright and the law, and all the copyright suits against AI and tech firms, will be fruitless since we either forget copyright like we used to know it, or we get left behind in development because we need to respect the copyright of everything and make contracts with every big outlet, etc. Big tech knows that, so they walk this gray zone walk to still train AI on copyrighted material but somehow proclaim they are not copyright-dependent.

I’m not saying this is a good development, just that I think we need to reassess how we treat copyright on a fundamental level under the current development structure of AI.

We need to slow down the development of AI and hinder monopolization of the market. My guess is it’s too late, but we can still hope that maybe this time it will be different.