Comment by ElFitz
6 hours ago
> The only genuine moat the frontier labs have is their product take-up
And even then, their is no stickiness. For most use cases there isn’t much value in one frontier model over the other.
Just have to look at the people flocking from one to the other for whatever reason.
I’m flocking from GPT to opus every week for the past 3 months and always come back.
The point isn’t that gpt is better, it’s that it is so much better for my work it isn’t even sticky, it’s reinforced concrete. I use opus 1% of the time because it writes better and it’s sticky there.
Yes I’ll switch approximately immediately if opus or Gemini (which I use more than opus!) is better for what I do, but at this point frontier model tokens are not fungible.
There will always be dataset and training quirks, and the provider’s own biases and focus, granting one model an edge over the others in some specific domain.
Yup and that’s where the moats are.
The large AI houses arguably ensure that model switching be a natural action for their clients, by switching the default model of their flagship offerings every few months. Such is the price of progress.