I'm old enough to remember the arrival of RDBMS, once IBM primed the space with DB2.

There was a pitched battle over features like row-level locking as competitors like Sybase, Ingress and Oracle scrapped it out. New features arrived on a monthly cadence, with immense engineering effort behind them. The winners (Oracle mostly) won a great moat which led to them to where they are today.

The fact that so many AI companies can produce amazing coding tools so quickly shows there is no moat, supporting your theory.

▲ dormento 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The AI companies moat, if any, is hoarding all the hardware so local solutions are no longer cost-effective.

▲ PowerElectronix 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That is impossible to fund. At some point someone will decide to stop throwing money on the firepit that's the current business model and then hardware prices crash back to earth as 60-70% of the global demand disappears overnight.

	▲	3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

▲ xdertz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is not really sustainable when there is a constant supply of increasingly powerful and efficient hardware.

	▲	twoodfin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right: Capital markets know how to efficiently turn dollars into tokens, even if it means tens of billions invested in new DRAM fabs.

▲ Joel_Mckay 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is more of a regulatory capture byproduct to prop up an artificial token driven Ponzi scheme.

There is a serious alternative to NVIDIA "AI" hardware dropping out of China in February 2027. There is no moat, but a whole lot of unpaid debts in the near future.

Popcorn ready =3

▲ Insanity 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Which Chinese alternative is that?

▲ Joel_Mckay 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Huawei is upgrading its Ascend 950PR (2.8 times an Nvidia H20 performance.)

https://apnews.com/article/huawei-ai-chips-nvidia-superpod-t...

Take it lightly until the benchmarks drop. ymmv =3

▲ munksbeer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I honestly have no expert knowledge about this stuff. What I say is based only on intuition.

  - China is heavily, heavily incentivised to enhance their own chip making
  - Looking at the rate Chinas has expanded into just about every single other
    space, and from quantity to quality, I just think it is impossible that they
    don't compete on equal grounds pretty soon.
  - I don't buy the insurmountable moat of TSMC

	▲	Joel_Mckay 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>I don't buy the insurmountable moat of TSMC Very wise, energy constraints are already feeding the hyper-scale gamblers their own hubris. =3

▲ beachy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Reminiscent of tank warfare in WW2. The soviet T-34 was not remarkable in any particular way, but the sheer volumes it was produced in made it a very serious enemy to German tanks. As Stalin said "quantity has a quality all of its own".