alt Hacker NewsThe Chinese could definitely eat their lunch if the US didn't decide to limit access to SOTA hardware.
So you could argue their moat is US government, not their model. I don't disagree with you, just saying what is their real moat.
The Chinese could definitely eat their lunch if the US didn't decide to limit access to SOTA hardware.
So you could argue their moat is US government, not their model. I don't disagree with you, just saying what is their real moat.
OpenAI's moat is the userbase and service layer, which is gigantic. It is extremely difficult to pull users away from giant services.
The Chinese models have no great branding with the masses, they have no service layer that any average user understands. Where does Joe go to use the Chinese model that he doesn't even know the name of? Joe has no clue what the difference between DeepSeek and Kimi is, and Joe will never know that.
They all know ChatGPT, they have all been trained on how to use it and what it is. The inertia is enormous and HNers endlessly undercount how that works because deep tech users all want to think the masses view tools like they do and approach tech like they do (which is entirely false).
OpenAI's future is as an ad platform in terms of its business. That's at least 2x-4x larger as a business opportunity than anything they have going on now. Which is to say $80-$160 billion minimum. That requires they maintain the giant userbase, we'll see how that goes. Losing it requires someone take it from them. Joe isn't just going to wake up tomorrow and go seek out how to use Kimi.
The LLM space is worth a minimum of half a trillion dollars per year in ad revenue. It will subsume all of search. Search becomes merely a service of an LLM, which will perform the function on your behalf. Google is on top of that shift, so OpenAI has its work cut out for it competing with Google there.
Of the US big three, Anthropic is by far the one most threatened by the persistence of the Chinese models. Anthropic will probably never stop being chased by them and will have to endlessly race to try to stay ahead. Anthropic has to figure out how to build out the LLM+ equivalent of AWS before China figures out how to beat them, ie build a very deep service / tool moat around Claude that the userbase gets stuck to. In short dramatically increase the difficulty in peeling away users, it has to become a big chore to switch (which eventually this is exactly what someone will figure out in that area of LLM competition).