While listening to the All-in podcast episode 179 about the new Open AI’s GPT-4o model there was an interesting insight.

It covered the need for a product developer to think about where an AI model ends and where your product begins. With the rate new models enter the market, you don’t want to throw away you products when the models change. And it could be better to open source certain things that are expensive to maintain.

It made me think about protocols as well. Where does a protocol end and a product begin? It seems to me that instead of silo’s, the web is starting to be more modular as it will be to expensive to maintain and develop everything as a company.

While it is something separate from this discussion, for me this also connects with livestream platform Twitch moving the encoding for AV1 to the user instead of doing it themselves. It’s just to expensive. But if you want it, you can do it.

Being more modular, like with ActivityPub, makes is possible to caters to much more different needs. Instead of trying to be the one size fits all.

I hope these upcoming changes help to diversify culture again instead of the unifying effect the big centralized platforms are enforcing.