All this means is that brand and distribution matters more than ever. There's 1000 chatgpt clones but everyone still uses chatgpt. There might be 1000 jev clones soon enough but people won't switch unless there's something significantly better about it.
It's also why Meta can make Muse and get a lot of users even though there's 10,000 personal agent startups
In jevs case I think the competing offerings will rear their head rather fast. The ability to label data like it does now leans itself well for distillation. And to switch out a model like fable for Astra is really not all that difficult. Yea jev is alone now. But before the end of the year another lab with the same offering will rear it’s head
> There's 1000 chatgpt clones but everyone still uses chatgpt. There might be 1000 jev clones soon enough but people won't switch unless there's something significantly better about it.
The fact that Jev will be cloned is exactly why brand and distribution matter even more. When 1,000 products do the same thing, you'll use the one you know.
It probably will happen over time as entropy does its thing, but the structure is different than what you describe.
For one, Howard is not the successor, Greg Abel is. Howard is a Stewart of culture, but he is not the leader.
He also isn’t inheriting Buffetts fortune so the generational rot won’t be the same.
Next, both Greg and Howard have been at Berkshire for decades, and however is next up will likely be similar. So there is time to pass on the values.
Laslty, Berkshire is a decentralized company. The company itself has less than 50 employees. All of the companies they own have their own leadership structures and cultures, and Berkshire does not burden itself in managing it. This makes the successor problem a lot easier
Warren was CEO until 9 months ago. While yes, he's been chairman for 50 years, he's been an exclusive chairman for only 9 months. The role is ambiguous anyways and it's pretty obvious that someone else won't have the authority Warren has. And his son has been a director for 30 years so it's not like he's a new hire
> but to oversee their family's share in the enterprise
Not exactly, he's there to oversee the culture of Berkshire and ensure it's continuity. Buffett is donating all of his wealth (and has already donated $66B), so there isn't a fortune to protect.
Berkshire is an institution of sorts at this point, and requires strong stewardship to prevent enshittification (for lack of a better word).
As someone who has some SaaS products that must connect to other SaaS products, I can tell you that this is somewhere that AI saved me a truck load of time.
A lot of SaaS companies change their API in subtle ways throughout the months probably too rapidly. GraphQL schema changes, splitting apart one api endpoint into 2, changes to authentication method required. A thousand little cuts.
This used to be my biggest time waster. Now it's barely on my radar. Life changing for me. I guess your mileage may vary.
Concurrently, the writing is on the wall for us SaaS product providers - lower margins, and more competition for the same reasons. I welcome it. More quality and choice at a better price for everyone.
At the same time, I think some kind of aggregator will emerge. In music, the tools to create music are so inexpensive that the market is flooded. In games it is becoming the same, now accelerated by LLMs. But there is always some type of aggregator ending up earning the money from most of that, rather than the people creating the content. Not sure how it will work out here, but I predict it will be another type of aggregator.
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