Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Well yes, generally in the business world all the "good stuff", the really smart analysis, is extremely confidential. Really smart people are putting these things together, but these types of analyses are a competitive advantage, so they're absolutely never going to share it publicly.

This was leaked, not intentionally made public.

And it all makes sense -- the people producing these types of business analyses are world-class experts in their fields (the business strategy not just the tech), and are paid handsomely for that.

The "regular stuff" people consume is written by journalists who are usually a bit more "jack of all trades master of none". A journalist might cover the entire consumer tech industry, not LLM's specifically. They can't produce this kind of analysis, nor should we expect them to.

Industry experts are extremely valuable for a reason, and they don't bother writing analyses for public media since it doesn't pay as well.

View on HN

Beware that there’s also a ton of bias when something is analyzed internally. As Upton Sinclair once said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

In the case of this analysis - it sounds great but it’s wrong. OpenAI has a huge moat. It has captured the mind share of the world. The software it has shipped is dramatically better than anything anyone else has shipped (the difference between useless and useful). We’ll see if folks catch up, but the race is currently OpenAI’s to lose.

Mind share is not a moat. And market share or being first is not a moat.

Moats are very specific things such as network effects, customers with sunk costs, etc. The very point of the term "moat" is to distinguish it from things like market share or mind share.

The article is correct, OpenAI has no moat currently.

What’s Google’s moat? Mind share and being dramatically better than the competition is indeed a moat. Trust me mind share is incredibly hard to gain in this day and age.

Google, according to the article, has no moat either.

> Mind share and being dramatically better than the competition is indeed a moat.

That's literally the opposite of what "moat" means, so no. You can't just make up different definitions for accepted terms if you want to have a productive conversation with anyone.

In AI? None (according to article). For their search engine? The distribution deals they have with Apple & android carriers for defaulting to them, and Chrome defaulting to them. If another search engine wanted to even release a product, theyd have to cross the distribution moat (possible on the web, just hard). For ads, the moat is their network of publishers. Competing ad marketplaces need to build a compelling publisher network to attract advertisers and compete for pixel space on publisher domains.

Agreed, I have some expertise in a couple software topics, and there is nowhere in public media that would pay me to write about it.

The only exception would be if my name were super recognizable/I had some legitimacy I could “sell” to publish something that did have commercial value, like some shitty CIO-targeted “article” about why XYZ is the future, in which case it’s not really going to be interesting content or actually sharing ideas.

Sort of like sports recruiters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com