If it were true that what OpenAI and Anthropic offer were commodities, that there is no moat, Microsoft could trivially eat their lunch. There would be no OpenAI. Google with its nation-state money, extreme AI talent, chips, datacenters, could eat their lunch.

So mighty Google can't manage it. But it's a commodity that's easily copied.

Somehow HN can't reconcile the contradiction even though it's laughably obvious.

Hey anybody could go MVP a ride hailing app over the weekend. It's a commodity app. Should be super easy with LLMs.

Oh shit, wait, you mean I'd have to take a billion users away from GPT and getting those users is now 50x harder than it was four years ago? You mean it's drastically harder to peel users away from existing services than if you get to start fresh? Ohhhh.

They have gigantic moats and so long as they don't do anything too stupid, those moats will just get stronger with time.

No VC is giving you money to try to run down OpenAI and Anthropic. Nobody is writing that $100 billion check. It's already over, HN is just in its standard denial phase.