alt Hacker NewsIt feels like the market is full Wiley Coyote on frontier model makers, and I like Anthropic's B2B business model.
But all progress points to a commodification of foundation models--Google first named it as "we have no moat, neither does anyone else." So there must be some secondary play driving this, right? Hardware sales? Hedging for search ad revenue?
Still feels mispriced. I think asset inflation leaves too much money desperate for the Next Big Thing.
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I don't get why people are so gung-ho about these companies having a moat.
As a user and a consumer, I don't want them to have a moat. Moat means pseudo-monopoly. That is the exact opposite of what we want.
Only the investors and owners want a moat, to keep others out.
So what they're doing? They're competing. Good.
I haven't thought about any secondary play, but if these companies converge on Google's TPUs, they would probably eagerly slice from NVIDIA's current market.
> In September 2025, Google is in talks with several "neoclouds," including Crusoe and CoreWeave, about deploying TPU in their datacenter. In November 2025, Meta is in talks with Google to deploy TPUs in its AI datacenters.
The “no moat” comment is from May 2023, very early in the LLM era. Agents were not a thing yet, it was all just text generation.
The integration of LLMs with tools and data via agent harnesses has created the opportunity for a real moat. As these products start differentiating, the moats will develop to be significant.
"we have no moat, neither does anyone else." is just an employee's personal work blog
We have no moat could be a bad assessment. First, the models have personalities, and that matters. I like talking Claude better. OpenAI is really different from Grok. The ai models are an extension of the main concern of the company they’re in.
Also those personalities, quirks and choices accumulate. A lot of people talk about using Claude Code and Codex for different things. This is 100% my experience. Some people make better models, but on the top 3, there are often differences that are fixed only by switching between them. If I feel the need to switch between them, then there are significant enough differences and those differences will accumulate.
You don't need a moat if you're selling shovels and everyone's digging holes.
Google does have a sort of temporary moat. They have a much better hardware supply line story than anyone else and the revenue to maintain that edge indefinitely.