That's not what "moat" means. Claude Code has a castle. A "moat" is meant to protect the castle from invaders. It would be things like high switching costs, proprietary formats, network effects, etc. that aren't there.

In other comments people mention the "flywheel" of data and money feeding training, but there's a view that at some point the baseline open-weight models are "good enough" that the money will dry up.

▲ aurareturn 7 hours ago | parent [-]

  baseline open-weight models are "good enough" that the money will dry up.

I take a different view. Open-weight models aren't going to be free forever. At some point, open weight model labs will also have to make money.

My guess is that the industry will consolidate. The winners will absorb the losers and focus on generating revenue.

Therefore, there will be a growing gap between open and free models and the proprietary SOTA models.

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vidarh 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What the open-weight labs have shown is that you can go from nothing to competing with SOTA models at a tiny fraction of the cost for the SOTA models.

If there is consolidation by absorption, that derisks attempting to challenge the SOTA providers, and so they will keep facing attempts.

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atwrk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But all the open-weight players make money right now. Google (Gemma), Alibaba (Qwen), z.ai (GLM), minimax.io (Minimax) - they all have hosted offers and sometimes closed-weight max versions.

And the fact that the open-weight as well as cheaper tier 2 offers exist both place a ceiling on the prices the SOTA companies can demand - and as far as we know current prices don't even fully pay for inference alone already, at least not for OpenAI.

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aurareturn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Are they profitable on their LLM training?

It's not clear. Z.ai is definitely not profitable.

	▲	atwrk an hour ago \| parent [-]
		To my knowledge none of the players is even profitable on inference, though Google probably is, considering the continuous release of papers around kv cache optimizations, mtp etc.

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thepasch 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Open-weight models aren't going to be free forever.

The ones that are already released are, and they're already very good for most purposes and can be fine-tuned indefinitely, includin months or years down the line when processes have been optimized and things aren't as compute-heavy as they are now.