It seems very difficult to build a moat around a product when the product is supposed to be a generally capable tool and the input is English text. The more truly generally intelligent these models get the more interchangeable they become. It's too easy to swap one out for another.
Humans are the ultimate generally intelligent agents available on this planet. Even though most of them (us) are replaceable for mundane tasks, quite some are unique enough so that people seek their particular services and no one else's. And this is among the pool of about eight billion such agents.
> Even though most of them (us) are replaceable for mundane tasks, quite some are unique enough so that people seek their particular services and no one else's.
Very few people manage that - indeed I can't think of anyone. Even movie stars get replaced with other movie stars if they try to charge too much. Certainly everyone in the tech industry (including the CEOs, the VCs, the investors etc.) has a viable substitute.
It's even more relevant to AI, because the differences between the models (not just training data) may make them pretty uniquely suited to some areas, with any competition being markedly worse (in that area), or at least markedly different. And you only have maybe dozens, not billions, to choose from.
The moat is/will be the virtuous cycle of feeding user usage back into the model like it is for Google. That historically has been a powerful tool and it's something thats nearly impossible to get as a newcomer to the marketplace.
