Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Why is everyone so obsessed with "moat"s every time a new GPT-type service or more general AI product pops up on HN?

Is that just a meme response now or is there more to it?

The market (and technology) is very immature. We have no idea what potential usecases, integrations, or models will ultimately dominate. Even if there is a single one-model-to-rule-them-all there is still going to be potential for smaller/almost-as-good models to be succession by doing direct integrations with various business or B2C usecases.

The chatbot UI is just one potential usecase that's popular now. That might have dominance in pure brand recognition and userbase, but it's not like they have network-effects or other lock-in either (besides maybe custom API integrations).

View on HN

> Why is everyone so obsessed with "moat"s every time a new GPT-type service or more general AI product pops up on HN?

Because of the second element of HNs domain name. Its a startup-community focussed forum, moat is an important business consideration, but especially so for startups.

Because if there's no moat, then the offer has extremely limited viability.

Try creating your own browser and see how well it does.

But why do you care?

It’s like debating whether “the internet” is a moat, in 1990.

Tech is never a moat. That’s not new or interesting. Business processes can be, brand can be, scale can be. And it is far far far far far far too early to even think about moats in the AI business.

How is it anything like a consumer browser?

This is what I’m talking about. It’s such a limited perspective on what LLMs mean as products/services. Everyone is so focused on the ChatGPT consumer interface they can’t see beyond it to the thousand niche business usecases. It’s as much an enterprise platform (meaning heavy custom usecases), in addition to a broad consumable API system for developers, and then the Google style search/chat Q&A UI.

Just because Poe/Claude is experimenting with an early consumer mobile app doesn’t mean that’s the business they ultimately plan to be in.

The network/monopoly effects of Google/Chrome/IE for pure consumer plays might make sense but we have no idea what the technical underpinning might look like in a decade. It could be just WebKit plus a few others or it could be more like Databases where you hit a baseline plateau for performance but there’s a hundred businesses built off all the variations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com