Comment by red_green_yell
15 hours ago
What? Ad networks REQUIRE a moat. Google Meta Amazon have historically defensible moats. ChatGPT? Zero moat. Good luck with that ad business!
15 hours ago
What? Ad networks REQUIRE a moat. Google Meta Amazon have historically defensible moats. ChatGPT? Zero moat. Good luck with that ad business!
A billion users and the extreme cost of infrastructure to compete are a gigantic moat.
You can't get the first and you can't get the money for the second. Nobody is going to give you $100 billion to underwrite the cost of competing with GPT at a one billion user scale (or even a 100 million user scale). The easy money is already drying up, the field is set, and you will not be able to get anybody to give you a huge check to attempt to chase OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, China. That's already over. No VCs will fund you on this particular business pursuit.
You couldn't meaningfully compete with OpenAI and Anthropic if you wanted to. There's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
There's a trillion dollar valuation waiting for you. What's up?
Even nation-state pockets Microsoft can't compete. If there were no moat, Microsoft would have their own GPT killer, and GPT would be dead. Microsoft has $160 billion per year in op income. They can freely afford to spend more than the entire EU (is willing to) on AI matters if it makes sense. They can't compete no matter how much they spend and they know it.
Google has nation-state money. They have chips. They have software developers by the zillions. They have a frontier or very near frontier model in Gemini / Argon. They invented a lot of the category. They can't kill GPT. I repeat, no matter what Google has thrown at the matter, they have failed to kill or stop GPT.
Google can't beat them. Microsoft can't beat them. China's models haven't stopped them (DeepSeek was supposed to kill them years ago; Kimi was supposed to kill them).
That's one helluva non-moat. They must just be really lucky.
You might as well claim Coca Cola has no moat because it's just sugar water. Brand at scale is a large moat. People use what they know unless you severely disrupt them. They're being taught to use GPT, they know GPT, and so long as OpenAI doesn't screw it all up, people will just keep using it. To say nothing of the fact that GPT still has one of the elite frontier models, so you also still have to compete with them on quality.