The Big Tech have always compensated their great failures by copying the successes of others. And with AI are already doing it

Good artists copy, The greats stealSteve Jobs or Pablo Picasso said. What they did not say is that the best artists are probably not done by one thing or the other: directly Buy “Works” They end up seeing how their own. We are continually seeing it in the technological field, and the last example is what is happening in the world of AI.

I’m going to buy a company. Google launched its own YouTube before YouTube. Three weeks before, in fact. On January 25, 2005, he announced the launch of Google Video, while YouTube would launch on February 14. We already know how the story ended: YouTube swept while Google Video barely managed to curdle. What did Google? Buy YouTube to solve the problem.

Problem solved with a talonario coup. Facebook did something similar with Instagram. The company created by Mark Zuckerberg saw the wolf’s ears, so he preferred Buy your competitive potentialwhich effectively became an absolute success and is now an integral part of its ecosystem.

Good artists copy. We have seen it many times: the Big Tech copy ideas as if there were no tomorrow. Facebook and Instagram did it with the Snapchat Storiesor the reels Copied from Tiktokand there are many other examples. There are times to copy works, but there are others in which those attempts end up in A true disaster.

The innovator dilemma. The obvious conclusion of all these movements is already known: the Big Tech do not want any other company to end up stealing their wallet. If someone begins to shade, they go for him, it will not be that they end up as Blackberry or Nokiathat seemed immortal and now they are just a minimum expression of what they were. All great technological ones know well about the Innovative dilemmaand none wants to be part of that group of companies that let another climb to Chepa.

Openai careful. The current situation is a reflection of that reality. It is happening in the world of artificial intelligence. Openai became from the launch of Chatgpt in the new great star of the technological panorama. Its excessive growth He quickly warned to almost all the great technological (but Not all), who launched ally with her or to compete directly with analogous platforms. But in addition to the Big Tech, they would compete, so many others did. And absolutely all these startups are in danger, because the Big Tech will not allow the “little ones” to steal their wallet.

Letter programming agents. We have seen the last example of this phenomenon with the agricultural platforms of AI to program. Cursor was a discovery For programmers, and unleashed fever for these tools. In recent weeks, we have seen how one of its competitors, Windsurf, has been bought by Openaiwho does not happy with that also took out his own programming tool, Codex. But it is that cursor and other startups such as Devin Or replicit ghostwriter they have it complicated, because Anthropic (Claude Code), Google (Jules), Microsoft (Github co -ilot) or Amazon (Codewhisperer).

Concentration in sight. This variety of options in that specific field of AI extends to many other areas: there are dozens of options to create images with AI, and the same if what we are looking for is to create music or even video. And the same for tools that transcribe audio, which make content summaries or that help in specific tasks of other types. The problem of all of them is that if one of those ideas is popularized, the Big Tech go to 1) Copy it or 2) If that doesn’t work, buy it. Except for exceptional cases, it is normal for the market to continue to dominate by a small group of large companies, leaving in the background very distant the startups that survive.

Image | Techcrunch | Anthony Quintano

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