Sounds like a great book, I think you've sold me on buying a copy.

Essentially I think there are three levels of positive network effects that will push us towards a future mega AI monopolist:

- Single platform network effects: all the interactions people have with ChatGPT generate additional training data that Open AI can use to improve future versions, creating huge first mover advantage.

- Individual-level network effects: Control vectors will make it feasible for Open AI to offer individualised ChatGPT tailored to individual preferences. The more you interact with ChatGPT, the better it adapts to your preferences.

- Cross platform network effects: If Open AI offer a generative video entertainment service in future, they will be able to generate personalised prompts for this using my personalised ChatGPT weights. These network effects are compounded by multi-modal model cross domain learning - the generative text mode gets more skillful due to the video model improving (and vice versa). There's a Microsoft paper on this from about a year ago now.

So, in the future scenario, let's assume ChatGPT is now the dominant monopolist 'text oracle / assistant AI' - because of the "human interaction / training data" network effects, ChatGPT is far and away the best assistant AI and getting better at a faster rate than any of its now tiny competitors (single platform network effects).

You, and most other people you know, interact with ChatGPT many times a day now, because it's embedded in smartphones, Alexa-type devices, your car, even your robot vaccum cleaner. You just ask it stuff and it tells you the answer - or rather, the answer that you individually find the most pleasing as OpenAI keeps a database of 'individual control vectors' that essentially mean you have your own personal version of ChatGPT that exactly matches your preferences (individual network effects).

Generative video entertainment is also offered by OpenAI - essentially you can get it to generate a new episode of your own personalised, never-ending TV show on demand. It's the best TV show you've ever seen because it's made just for you according to your exact inferred preferences.

Sure, there are other personalised generative TV show offerings, but none can hold a candle to Open AI's offering. Why? Because OpenAI uses your individually customised ChatGPT model to generate the prompt for your TV episode generator service.

Because you interact with ChatGPT so much, it knows exactly what your preferences are and so is way better at generating prompts that produce episodes you like. In fact, because you interact with ChatGPT multiple times throughout the day it is able to infer what your mood is like on that particular day and generate a video prompt that caters to that too.

So you put on your Open AI VR glasses, barely even aware of the Open AI fitness tracker you have on your wrist, put your feet up (so your Open AI robot vacuum can work unobstructed) and you settle in to watch another episode of the best TV series you've ever seen.

As you watch, your eye movements, heart rate, skin conductivity data etc. are all sent back to Open AI so the model can tell exactly how you are reacting to the video content it is generating at any given moment, and your individual control vectors are continuously updated.

Some of this data (from all users) is then used to further train the base video generating AI model, since they've discovered that we all react fairly uniformly to certain audio-visual stimuli, so that can globally improve their generative model (more global network effects). But also they can update your individualised weights based on your individual idiosyncratic reactions to various stimuli. Consequently, every new episode of this endless TV show is better than the last - it just keeps getting better and better. It's a similar story when you listen to your Open AI personalised generative music stream while sitting in your driverless Open AI car on your way to work.

The multiple levels of network effects are so strong that no-one can hope to compete with Open AI across these different AI modalities. They just keep expanding and expanding into adjacent markets, obliterating the competition simply by adding a new domain relevant modality to their monstrous multi-modal AI.

Replace "Open AI" with "Facebook" or "Google" depending on who you think will win the AI mega platform war. Mark my words - these three companies will be creating new partnerships, releasing new products or just straight out acquiring companies in other related domains so they can gather more and more training data to feed to their multi-modal AI. In particular they'll move into markets where they can set up a interaction -> gather new training -> retrain model loop. Whoever takes the overall lead and doesn't squander it will end up leaving their competitors in the dust as they go on to monopolise market after market where they can create this loop.

At that point I can't imagine true democracy surviving. We'll all still participate in the voting rituals, but we'll be voting for whichever party most suits the AI monopolist's interests since they can just globally update all control weights across all platforms to gently nudge us towards voting for their preferred party - comprehensive and personalised propaganda, that's impossible to detect, with the stroke of a table update.

There can only be one!