Pretty shameless copy, but also shows how easy it is to do so. OpenAI and Anthropic had first-mover advantage, but easy come, easy go.

Safe to say there is no moat.

You mean other than the zillion dollars of infrastructure you need to run these systems for a billion users. And the extreme cost to sustain that operation day to day. And the cost to upgrade the infrastructure forever.

Remind me which entities (govt or corporate) are going to subsidize that forever. Remind me which entities are going to front the cost just to scale up.

By that premise - wherein you forget everything other than the first ingredient (the model) - Google has no moat either (got $100 billion dollars lying around?). Nor does Uber (have tens of billions in your bank account to clone their business?).

I'm certain building an app (Uber), or building a search engine (Google), is the super duper hard part.

Slapping a GUI on Linux will kill Windows, any day now.

Sure if you want to bake a cake you also need to invent the universe first…

As long open weight models get released; no moats are going to exist. Both windows and Linux are weak comparisons.

Hyperscalers would generally be expected to sell compute to anyone who is willing to pay assuming that supply/demand for datacenter hardware evens out at some point that should become true again.

If money is the only moat, you'll see race to bottom till ROCE goes down to gsec returns.