alt Hacker NewsGoogle figured this out with their paper from 2023, We have no moat and neither does OpenAI. The moat now is the harness and being able to recursively self improve from RLHF, a great example is how Grok used to be pretty bad but since SpaceX bought Cursor, they used that data to train Grok 4.5 which is now very competent at coding and even exceeds frontier models in certain benchmarks.
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
Replies
jeffybefffy519 • today at 1:04 PM
Surely the moat is the training data... with the data you can explore new architectures much easier and get step changes in performance.
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vorticalbox • today at 6:29 PM
Is it RLHF if there is no human feedback?
ListeningPie • today at 12:17 PM
And yet investment is continuing. What are they counting on?
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Moat is not the harness. Harness itself is temporary until the models get better and slowly the code in harness will go down.
Note that the biggest GPU providers in the world are the hyper scalers and even they couldn’t allocate more if you pay for it. Because the rich companies and well funded ones are gobbling them up to the point where if tomorrow a 5T model that smokes every other model in the world is released you just can’t afford inference.