Llama model distribution is commodification of complement if I've ever seen one
@niplav If I like a post, it's not because I got what you meant and totally agree, but rather because I learned something new & interesting from it. I wasn't familiar with the term. Thanks!
I feel like there are other words for it too. It's another frame on all the unhappy Nash equilibria caused by high switching-costs / dyscoordination.
@rime huh, I hadn't connected the two
@rime care to perhaps elaborate?
(sorry long-reply, but it's effort to condense!)
commodification of complement: when a company starts out w ~monopoly on a tech-category X, so they try to develop popular *open source* things that depend *specifically* on X, such that anyone who tries to develop a competitor version of X have to start from near the bottom of the tech tree. if things are opensource, they mobilise enthusiastic community efforts to proliferate variations of it too, thereby locking in X's advantage.
@niplav eg every popular programming language ever, intentionally or not, remain popular by virtue of being commoditised complements. i speculate that people have already invented many alternative langs that are objectively better than popular langs (eg JS) for many tasks, but there's enormous inertia to switching (aka refactoring) everything to use the better lang.
