Why Does Garry Tan Fear a Future Run by Five AI Kings?

Garry Tan fears a future in which a light cone of commercial value collapses into five AI kings. Friends inside some of the AI labs, he says, were already describing that picture last year: anything a business might do could end up inside five companies. Walter Isaacson had asked whether Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini would consolidate to two or three. Tan says such a consolidation would be pretty horrible, and that the field is already there.

He wants personal AI instead, closer to the personal computer than to a social feed. A feed run by a big tech company has a business model that works best when it enrages or divides people, and the company keeps the control. Personal AI, as he hopes it develops, would know a person's goals and put the choice of what reaches them back in their hands. He points to the 1984 Macintosh commercial and to Steve Jobs's line that IBM did not have to win the whole thing. He says next year looks like a browser war over whose AI agent people use, with room for more than one system, the way there was a Mac and a PC.

The disruption he is working on is policy, funding the next founders, open markets, and open source. What he wants is Linux for personal AI, an open-source operating system easy enough and cheap enough that everyone chooses it.