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Comment by rwaksmunski | Hacker News Reader

As an investor, what's the moat here? Being 6 months ahead of China's open source/weight models?

What is the moat of any tech company if they are using LLMs to build their products which can also be reverse engineered by an LLM? Hardware?

For big ones it’s often network effects and/or friction. Those can be pretty good moats even with LLMs. These models are also nowhere near the point where they can actually reverse engineer complex products.

Network effects have subsequently been; shown to be logarithmic. You’re not getting 100x the benefit from 10x the users. You’re lucky to be getting 12x the benefit and you also have logarithmic increases in costs because there’s no such thing as economies of scale in software. You pay for every order of magnitude in hardware or software development costs.

It was six months last year, it’s on the order of weeks now. Presumably they have unreleased models that are a step ahead still. The moat is capacity and how much of an ecosystem the can build around the llms; eg anthropic figma tool.

Oh how badly I wish this was true.

How much easier my life would be if Chinese open models were even just 1 year behind outside of X posts and one-shots.

My easy litmus test is would the year old model (Opus 4.5) being open sourced today would eat the traffic of every single Chinese model... and the answer is pretty much yes.

Every Chinese model would throw away their work just to post-train or distill Opus 4.5 and get a more reliable model.

Having compute to serve the demand.

I always bought on who I thought was best at attracting the best talent in the space, and for how long they could remain dominant in that.

decent software stack that works out of the box.

You can go very far in life with a thing that isn't futzy

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