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Comment by jethro_tell | Hacker News Reader

These companies have no moat at all.

Their moat is their research capability. It's a combination of proprietary internal technology and models and infrastructure, people, organizational structure, and culture. As long as they maintain the best and fastest research capability, they have a durable advantage, at least for the time being. If we start to saturate all economically useful outcomes that can be reached via greater research productivity attainable to us, then this moat will start to fall apart. It could also fall apart if safety issues force a premature halt or major slowdown to further research.

That's not that big of a moat though, as we've seen with DeepSeek and even smaller teams doing edge model work.

It's very hard to measure exactly how large it is, because there aren't good pre-existing metrics for it. You can measure in time (e.g., how far behind open weight models are from the best frontier models commercially available), but it's plausible that what seems like a relatively small time advantage (months) might mask a considerable difference in internal research sophistication. What we've seen repeatedly is simply that there does seem to exist a durable advantage in research productivity, at least for now.

How long till that "research capability" becomes just 5 people with many AI agents, and no other humans in the main research loop?

I don't know and can't answer or predict that. But that's exactly what it could become (although probably not that extreme), where the agents doing much of the internal work are proprietary, conferring a research advantage.

My point is that it is not a real moat if other players can hire people from core research teams, and get a foothold that easily. And when/if models are good enough, you don't even need many people to form a fully functioning team.

It may actually get harder to replicate with time, not easier, even if the number of people needed to run the operation goes down. As the largest labs move towards internal RSI, the most important IP for doing that will transition into their proprietary internal infrastructure and models, none of which will ever be released and which increasingly won't be fully known or understood by the humans you might hire away.

This assumes any research gains last. In practice it seems like none of the frontier companies can keep much of their "secret sauce" secret for very long.

If company X has a better model than company Y, do you use it? Well, that depends: will Y take two years to catch up? If so yeah, you buy X.

But if Y is just as good a few months later, you purchase based on other factors, because you know you can live without the brilliant research X is doing ... since you'll have it soon enough.

I’m not sure I’d call maintaining the fastest research program a “durable advantage”.

If their moat is their ability to create marginal improvements every few months by releasing new models, then that is an extremely expensive moat to maintain.

You mean, if they keep running quick enough they are save? That's like the compete opposite of a moat, in my mind at least.

The problem with your logic is that the history of tech is full of “good enough” eating “best” for lunch all day long. Anthropic’s plan to be the best is increasingly looking like a terrible business plan.

> Their moat is their research capability.

Research does not bring in revenue. Products or services do.

So far, it does, because the products and services are the general intelligence produced by the research.

... on a flat slope towards commodification

I think the staggering amounts of compute and capital at their disposal is a kind of moat.

You need those staggering amounts of compute to run an inference service, but you don't need it to run a powerful model.

It doesn't cost a company that much to buy a box capable of running the Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model in the GP comment and never pay Anthropic again. The cost will be even more reasonable once the supply issue is solved for that hardware.

AI-as-a-service is a unique product because when the interface is natural language, there is no lock in. VS code has a hotkey to swap between claude, openai and a local model. Compare that to the difficulty of swapping from macOS to Windows.

I’m not convinced that being able to serve open models makes the closed labs business model non-viable. I think there is overlap but I also think these are distinct value propositions. I wouldn’t dismiss the ability for one organization to point lots of resources at a particular problem, for example.

I don’t have any stake in this and I hate the idea of concentrated wealth and power, wherever it is: government or private businesses. But would I bet against it? Probably not.

Sure, but anyone with money could do that.

We're the only people that can spend this money is not a moat.

That argument seemed to have legs in 2022 when OpenAI was the only game in town.

But the fact that were even talking about Anthropic like this only a few short years later demonstrates that that was only kind of a kind of moat.

the idea of a moat is that it's an inexpensive way to keep the invaders at bay.

If you need to buy staggering amounts of compute, spend staggering amounts in utility costs and lobbying, and keep spending that as your hardware amortizes and your operations go on, what you have isn't a moat, it's a standing army. It's extremely expensive, and the day you start having issues, mercenaries will cut your throat before you know it.

Capital only means anything if you can spend it to buy resources like compute and turn those resources into additional value.

Hardware's ridiculously expensive. Then, there's no good place to put it, because the new breed of tech bro managed to propose the data center buildout in the most exploitative, alienating, and electorate-angering way possible. So compute's hard to buy.

I wouldn't be so sure about capital in future. I think there might be real look for return on any new capital they are getting. Be it equity or debt. And that alone will not be great for them.

compute and debt*

Banks are going to want that "capital" to materialize into gains at some point. The water in that moat is evaporating.

The current compute they are buying is NOT state of the art (check this year's academic research on inference hardware). There is 10x-100x inference-per-watt improvements in existing prototypes (in the industry, not just academia). Not sure what I am talking about? Ask your friendly AI agent of choice, for the details.

Check out mythic.ai for one example.

How long they will have access to staggering amounts of compute is uncertain and not guaranteed, especially if they get a junk or near-junk credit status when they go public.

The capital is running out and the compute is a massive liability on their balance sheet. Your definition of a moat is rather odd.

How much of their compute is leased/rented? Last I read it was quite a lot of it.

The moat is the data they have collected. There is no way that the "de-identified" data from enterprise customers isn't making it into the training set one way or another.

Even worse, their "moat" depends on buying the most overpriced hardware in huge quantities and subsequently eat a huge amortization loss in a few years when it's obsolete.

I’m waiting for somebody to use one of the frontier models to hack its own data centre and exfiltrate everything…

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