Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by burntcaramel 78 days ago
Previously Anthropic subscribers got access to the latest AI but it seems like there’s a League of Software forming who have special privileges. To make or maintain critical software will you have to be inside the circle?

Who gates access to the circle? Anthropic or existing circle members or some other governance? If you are outside the circle will you be certain to die from software diseases?

Having been impressed by LLMs but not believing the AGI hype, I now see how having access to an information generator could be so powerful. With the right information you can hack other information systems. Without access to the best information you may not be able to protect your own system.

I think we have found the moat for AI. The question is are you inside or outside the castle walls?
3 comments
kouru225 78 days ago
They’ve been trying their hardest to find a moat for 5 years, and nothing seems to stick. At first it seemed like access to the model could be a moat but then llama and deepseek came out. Then it seemed like the hardware requirements could be a moat but small local AI just kept getting more efficient. Now they’re trying to gate keep access to the models again under the guise of security, but we probably got like t minus 2 weeks before an equivalent model is released by someone

American AI desperately wants AI to intensify the wealth disparity and therefore justify the wealth grab that the rich have done for the last 3 decades and AI is just not cooperating

link
6thbit 78 days ago
It's only a moat if you believe no competing lab will achieve similar or better results in a large enough time frame to profit from it.
link
theptip 78 days ago
Thats not what a moat means in business. It doesn’t mean impregnable, it just means expensive or difficult to cross.

It is absolutely a moat if only $1T companies can afford the capex to compete.

link
6thbit 78 days ago
non-zero already existing companies can afford to compete, so its not a great preliminary line of defense against your main enemies.

If the existing competition's turn around time to out-benchmark you is in the order of weeks, its an absolutely terrible moat.

link
thatxliner 78 days ago
I feel like people keep forgetting that it’s possible to code without ai, but yes arguably a lot slower, typically.
link