Is it me or do none of the AI companies have a "moat" in the Ben Grahmm sense.

I use their services, but I frankly don't care who provides it. I'll chase the chepest/best and have no issue switching from one to another.

The only moat I can see is Microsoft providing its services to companies in its Azure system. Nervous IT departments probably like that it's not leaving their control if Bob in the SAP team spins up some AI crap.

I've been thinking for a while, there's not real winners here except the incumbent technology providers. Hear me out: all models are converging towards the same level, gains are getting smaller and harder to come by. The models are commodities nothing more.

This is the leap, nobody really wants to front a model for someone else. If i build an agent, or a service that requires a model, I'd prefer to push the model onto someone else, preferably at no cost. This is a leap as I'm sure right now, most people / businesses are thinking actually i do want to own / front the model.

However, if you accept the leap the easiest way to do this is to make the model the users problem.

From a business point of view that makes things really easy, from a customer point of view, they simply have to accept whatever their vendor of choice is pushing down their throats.

So as a business I build for whatever model Google makes available to android, and whatever model windows bundles, and whatever model Apple bundles, and, excluding the long tail of Chinese vendors and Linux (sorry, its always left out) and that's it, problem solved, and the customer picks up the tab for the tokens

I've found that there is value in consuming AI services from your existing cloud provider. Customers and auditors have less of an issue with "we use AI services from AWS/Azure/GCP" if the data was already in those clouds and it doesn't expand the risks of data being breached, or trained on, by some other provider.

When you are already trusting 100% of your data, and computing on that data, to someone like AWS, it doesn't meaningfully increase risk to use an additional service, even if it is an AI service.

Google has a bit of a Network Effect going... my vehicle got an OTA update to use Gemini. Between that, search, storage, and the YT Premium bundle it was enough to convince me to float a subscription.

I think anthropic with its enterprise strategy and google with its integration in everything have a bit of a moat.

But I switched from ChatGPT to Claude 3 months ago because my account was down for like 6 hours. I haven’t used it since. It’s too easy to switch away from chatbots on a whim. There is no moat for that.

The moat is shifting from technology to access to proprietary training data. It doesn't matter how good your LLM platform is if you don't have good data to feed the training run. Public Internet data and published media is already mined out. Now the frontier LLM vendors have shifted to licensing proprietary data that's locked up behind corporate firewalls, and even hiring human domain experts specifically to create new training content in target verticals. You'll see the effects of this next year, although it might not be obvious to those who mostly only use LLMs for coding tasks in popular programming languages for which there was already a lot of training data.

AWS and Google at least own their own hardware (Trainium and TPUs, respectively). It's a moat in the sense that designing, building, and deploying your own chips at scale is quite a feat and not easily replicated. The vertical integration will allow them to continue to be profitable once the models get good enough and competitors' prices race to the bottom. Google has Gemini; AWS may not deploy its own models (yet?), but that's not necessarily a losing position, as long as the market is able to run models sourced elsewhere on Trainium and the price is right.

The adoption of standards like skills and agent setup helps a ton. Nobody wants to be locked into an AI vendor like with cloud systems in general. And companies can't hold on to the #1 spot across multiple areas for very long, so users are even more motivated to move their process and stack between coding tools and AI companies behind them like Claude code.

Vendor lock in cannot happen, or you're bankrupt.

You may not care, but a lot of people I know care what brand chat bot they use personally,. usually it's tied to trust and reputation more than anything else. People are fickle.

Amazon Bedrock is probably middlemanning an insane amount of token consumption these days for the same reasons.

> I use their services, but I frankly don't care who provides it. I'll chase the chepest/best and have no issue switching from one to another.

For the hyperscalers, there is an ease of remaining in the Azure/AWS/GCP fabric from a data provenance perspective, particularly for regulated industries or large, risk-averse enterprises. There's also, of course, a certain network egress tax in most cases.

Nvidia has a moat. Hardware is hard. No one really competes with them for general compute

Uhh. I actively and vocally avoid all things Microsoft. I see Microsoft and I immediately think buggy software with zero security.