Bingo. The secret sauce is never a sustainable long term moat. Things leak, competitors copy, or they make even better things, employees switch jobs. AI looks less vulnerable, since it’s academically difficult and expertise is still limited. But time and time again, new secret sauce ingredients last for months at a maximum, before they are exceeded oftentimes by hobbyists or other small actors.

I remember at Google they said well if source code leaks nobody is actually worried about stealing tech, the vast majority of code is open to all employees, with some exceptions like spam-, ranking, etc. It’s still protected, but not considered moat.

The moat comes from other things, such as datacenter & global networking infrastructure, marketing new products by pushing them through existing products (put Gemini in search, add chrome to Android etc). Most importantly you can use data you already have to bootstrap new products, say Gmail and calendar integrated with personalized assistants.

If you play your cards right, yes there’s some first-mover advantages, but they are more superficial than your average Twitter hype thread makes you think. It can give you the ability to set unofficial standards and APIs, like Kubernetes, S3 – (maybe OpenAI APIs?). And you can set certain agendas and market your name for recognition and trust. But all that can slip through your fingers if a behemoth picks up where you left off. They have so many advantages, except for being the fastest.