alt Hacker NewsI think the 'models have no moat' thing is overblown. Only like 3-4 companies in the entire world have cutting edge models, that means there is some kind of moat...
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rvnx • yesterday at 8:11 PM
Money.
That's their moat.
Maybe also stolen copyrighted content that cannot be found anywhere else now, so they are the only ones who can train on it.
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I think when you follow this stuff every day it's easy to lose perspective of the rate of change and these leads seem more profound than they really are when you zoom out a bit.
I'm no super-insider, I only hear industry scuttlebutt like everyone else, but I have about a 95% confidence that the last 18 months has just been about more and better, without any kind of real leap or breakthrough. More hardware, more data, better technique. Well, technique diffuses as people change companies, hardware can be built, and data can be gathered (or stolen!).
From my admittedly outsider perspective, the only years-long moat there is who has the most hardware. If you have the hardware, you can give away the compute to get the data (hello, subsidized subscriptions!). Technique can simply be hired. The only durable, multi-year advantage is the hardware.
So is that a moat? Sure, but it doesn't have a whole lot to do with the leading model companies of the moment. ASML is the real moat, and so it's ASML China is besieging, correctly (IMO) identifying that everything else can be caught up easily enough.
Check back in a few years...