Comment by labcomputer

> Their moat is their research capability.

That doesn't seem like much of a moat. What happens when a couple researchers go on new parent leave at the same time, or someone's productivity drops for a quarter because a parent passed, or gets divorced, or whatever?

Continually staying 6 months ahead of the distilled open-weight models means you need to keep flipping heads (nobody goes on vacation) until the end of time. The geometric distribution describes that, and it ain't pretty for the expectation value of these companies.