AI is not a product per se, it is a technology you can decline into a product, and the product has a lot less value than the technology itself. Who has the best LLM can copy any product idea and make it a lot better. Similarly if open weight LLMs are everywhere and powerful, open source products in the space of agents are too simple to replicate for people to pay big money to a few companies: not everything is alike, not every parallel makes sense. The pi agent is good as a replacement for Codex and Claude Code if you wire frontier models to it. And when products are complex and matter a lot, like complicated AI-powered design suites for instance, there is no reason why OpenAI / Anthropic will win this space instead of a random startup. So either a few companies retain frontier AI, or those companies will die.

About IRC / Slack: other than the fact IRC was abandoned, Slack is about control, not product. The product is terrible.

FTP / Dropbox: this comparison does not make sense.