It still feels to me like OpenAI has zero moat. There are like 5 paid competitors + open source models.

I switch between gemini and ChatGpt whenever I feel one fails to fully grasp what I want, I do coding in claude.

How are they supposed to become the 1 trillion dollar company they want to be, with strong competition and open source disruptions every few months?

Yea, I agree.

Arguably LLMs are both (1) far easier to switch between models than it is today to switch from AWS / GCP / Azure systems, and (2) will be rapidly decreasing switching costs for your legacy systems to port to new ones - ie Oracle's, etc. whole business model.

Meanwhile, the whole world is building more chip fabs, data centers, AI software/hardware architectures, etc.

Feels more like we're headed to commodification of the compute layer more than a few giant AI monopolies.

And if true, that's actually even more exciting for our industry and "letting 100 flowers bloom".

Of course they dont, the only advantage it ever had was the willingness to destroy trust on the internet by scraping everything from everyone rules and expectations be dammed.

The underlying architecture isnt special, the underlying skills and tools aren't special.

There is nothing openAI brings to the table other than a willingness to lie, cheat, and steal. That only gives you an edge for so long.

The moat of OpenAI is 1. internal knowledge they've built over the last few years building front tier models 2. their talent 3. the ChatGPT brand (go ask a random person on the street, they know ChatGPT but not Claude or Gemini)

I don’t know if they can pull it off but a lot of companies are built on strong enterprise sales being able to sell free stuff with a bow on it to someone who doesn’t know better or doesn’t care.

Isn’t the moat in the product/UI/UX? I use Claude daily and love the “scratch notebook” feel of it. The barebone model does not get you any of this.

Premium grade deals with Oracle. They will bullshit their way into government and enterprise environments where all the key decision makers are clueless and/or easily manipulated.