As of November 30, 2025, the overall market structure Chamath described has not yet clearly materialized, but enough uncertainty remains that it’s too early to call his medium‑term prediction right or wrong.

1. No single dominant closed‑source winner (yet)
The frontier model market is currently an oligopoly with several major proprietary providers: OpenAI, Google (Gemini), Anthropic (Claude), Meta, xAI (Grok), Alibaba (Qwen), Moonshot (Kimi), and others. Industry and news coverage describe an intensifying global AI "race" with many strong players rather than a winner‑take‑most equilibrium. (wired.com) Enterprise share data likewise shows Anthropic ~32%, OpenAI ~25%, Google ~20%, Meta ~9% in enterprise AI—no single dominant firm. (businessinsider.com) That contradicts the current existence of “one startup” winning the closed‑source market, but it does not rule out future consolidation.

2. "Bunch of open‑source alternatives" asymptotically close in capability
This part of the prediction is largely borne out already. There are numerous open‑weight or permissively licensed frontier‑class models—Meta’s Llama 4 series, Alibaba’s Qwen3 family, Mistral’s Mixtral/Magistral line, Google’s Gemma, Chinese models like DeepSeek and Kimi K2—that benchmark close to leading closed models (GPT‑4.5, Claude, Gemini) on many tasks. (lagomconsulting.co.uk) This matches Chamath’s picture of many open alternatives that are “asymptotically similar” in capability.

3. Arms race on cost and compute
The cost/compute part of his prediction is very clearly correct. Reports detail enormous capital expenditures on AI infrastructure—Big Tech collectively spending well over $100B per year on AI datacenters, with forecasts toward $400B by 2026, plus multi‑gigawatt compute build‑outs and million‑TPU/GPU deals. (superintelligencenews.com) Analyses explicitly frame this as an AI infrastructure “arms race,” driven by the cost of GPUs, power, and cooling.

4. Why the verdict is inconclusive
Chamath’s core structural claim is that over the medium term the market will resemble ride‑sharing—one dominant closed‑source winner plus many open alternatives competing mainly on cost/compute. While the open‑source and cost/compute aspects are already visible, the crucial “one startup can probably win” part concerns a future equilibrium. Today’s evidence points to a crowded, rapidly evolving oligopoly with no single winner and active competition among several giants and well‑funded startups. (wired.com) Given that “medium term” in a tech/VC context usually means roughly 3–5 years and we’re only ~1.5 years past the prediction, the market has not had time to settle into a stable structure.

Because the decisive part of the prediction (eventual winner‑take‑most dominance by one proprietary provider) has neither clearly occurred nor been ruled out yet, the fairest classification as of late 2025 is "inconclusive (too early)".