[echelon]

There is no moat for OpenAI.

They spent a lot of money to find a lot of shallow gradients. Everyone else can climb those same gradients by putting in a little bit of money. Every single funded vertical and research org is proving this. Players in third place and below are incentivized to release their weights to develop an ecosystem around them. Meta and Tencent get to ensure the technology doesn't evolve beyond them by commoditizing their compliment and releasing stuff like Llama and Hunyuan for free.

Furthermore, OpenAI hasn't stumbled across a defensible moat. There's zero switching cost to move to another product, and they don't control any major panes of glass to stay as a default.

If OpenAI doesn't find a moat soon, they're gonna be cooked. The value of foundation models will plummet.

[bugglebeetle]

They won’t because they drove away all their actually talent to Anthropic and elsewhere in pursuit of the dumbest version of SV product dev and are now forced to do benchmark hacking in a paper thin ruse to convince the market they still have the talent to compete. The o1 series models are unusable in practice while Claude and the new MCP protocol work is becoming the basis of a bunch of actually functional applications.