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wg0 • yesterday at 10:36 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

Basically only moat left are either if you have "Data" or "Compute". Software layer is worthless and pretty much reproducible.

Data as in YouTube is all just data. Building a website and app around it isn't the hard problem. Anyone can launch another YouTube in few months but that would be pointless.


Replies

Gareth321 • yesterday at 10:48 AM

Yes, and increasingly, data will no longer be a moat either. These models will be capable of creating all the data/content we could ever want. There will always be a market for "organic" movies with real actors, but we should expect the value of that to decline precipitously.

My investment thesis is currently around these strata:

1. Electricity. All analysis shows massive shortages beginning now with no end in sight. Western governments in particular have massively dropped the ball on this one.

2. Chip design and production. Nvidia and TSMC dominate here for a few reasons. Partners required in the supply chain like ASML benefit, but they're not really the bottleneck right now. We're seeing a lot of investment pouring into this space and we'll see competent design competition (especially from Google's TPUs, and potentially from Apple and AMD). Chip fab is very difficult to get right, and takes a long time to ramp up. See the NAND space.

3. AI labs. These guys are doing to get commoditised. They're trying very hard to prevent distillation but I think it's impossible. The open weight models are not far behind, and the Chinese labs are getting very creative about how they work with limited hardware. If anything, they'll decrease inference cost over time, reducing the value of existing data centers (of which OpenAI and Anthropic have purchased an enormous amount). I am very bearish on the future value of OpenAI and Anthropic.

4. Software. So much software. Everyone gets software. The companies which benefit from this will be able to monetise it. Google, for example, might put ads into VERY capable and free AI. People might accept that. Microsoft has been investing heavily into their data centers, and maybe that's their revenue center in the future. Especially securely hosted services. I expect massive growth in this space in the short term. As long as people still have high paying jobs, they'll pay for well made software and tailored services.

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Melatonic • yesterday at 9:22 PM

YouTube requires a hell of a lot of infrastructure and Compute to do well