I'm a bit sceptical of the "no moat" proposition because (a) ChatGPT 4.0 really does seem in a different league and (b) it's clearly very hard to run. I haven't seen anything from the explosion of open source / community efforts that comes close for general applications.

The take in the post rings of the classic trademark Google arrogance where they assume that if somebody else can do it they can do it better if they just try - where the challenge of "just trying" is discounted to zero. In reality, "Just trying" is massively important and sometimes all that is important. The gap between unrefined model output and the level of polish and refinement that is apparent with ChatGPT 4 may appear technically small but it's the whole difference between a widely applicable and usable product and something that can't be more than a toy. I'm not sure Google has it in it any more to really fight for something they want to achieve that level of polish.