[boron1006]

I think anthropic with its enterprise strategy and google with its integration in everything have a bit of a moat.

But I switched from ChatGPT to Claude 3 months ago because my account was down for like 6 hours. I haven’t used it since. It’s too easy to switch away from chatbots on a whim. There is no moat for that.

[lelanthran]

> I think anthropic with its enterprise strategy and google with its integration in everything have a bit of a moat.

But... Anthropic doesn't have a moat. It's clear at this point that SOTA models are not a moat, and Opus 4.6-level (or GLM 5.2) is sufficient.

Google, though... they own the entire vertical, from the semiconductors to the end-user software. They may have a moat.

[LarsDu88]

The narrative that superintelligence is imminent is partially at fault here.

There are competing definitions of what intelligence even is, and the one that I find most striking is from Francois Chollet which is that intelligence can be boiled down to skill acquisition efficiency. This type of definition makes intelligence more akin to polishing a ball than growing a watermelon.

The superintelligence doomers warn that the watermelon is going to start growing exponentially and crush everyone. But what might actually be happening is that we are not growing a watermelon but rather polishing the ball until its really smooth and shiny. There's a point where you can get it to micron levels of polish but for most tasks (white collar text domains tasks), it's smooth enough! You will be able to go to the ball store and buy a low cost made in china ball for most tasks.

The real challenge is actually branching out domains and modalities to tackle things like blue collar labor. Over time, white collar work automatable or able to be made hyperefficient by LLMs will see LLM commoditization.

[Vexs]

Observationally, for people that /aren't/ using models to code but to just do their white-collar job, claude.ai /is/ AI, now. The entire perspective for how to use AI is through claude skills, claude projects, claude cowork, etc. They've massively won the corp buy-in at the moment I believe.

[rad-b]

Fully agree, that’s how I see most of my less technical coworkers reason about using AI. “Is there a Claude skill for that?” is a question I hear multiple times a week.

I see a lot of comments (incl 2 sibling comments) are always discussing whether there is a moat on AI. We agree there is no technical moat, there is nothing that Anthropic or any other AI lab could do that wouldn’t be quickly offered by other competitors too. However, _market penetration is the moat_. The deeper Anthropic is in relationships with orgs, the higher the cost of switching. Sure, for an individual it’s a 2-second job, but for a business it’s actual work of changing permissions, provisions, updating vendors etc. Nothing catastrophic but still real work, implying that Anthropic would need to drop the ball significantly to be swapped out, and wouldn’t be just because there’s a competitor who does everything kinda the same for kinda the same price (or slightly less).

Moat can be in execution and not just in technology. McDonalds has no specific burger-making technology that no other restaurant can acquire, what they do have is a well-scaled execution. Sure, there are competitors, and sure there are new comers to the burger space with different recipes (e.g. smash) but that doesn’t mean McDonalds is going under. Market penetration is the moat.

[tart-lemonade]

People always underestimate the moat that is institutional agility/ossification. There may be no theoretical moat in software, but every time you switch HR or financial systems you find out the hard way just how many integrations have been built (directly or indirectly) around a specific way of thinking about organizational data imposed by the software containing it, all of which require significant rewrites for the new system's conceptualization. The costs of switching add up fast and the risks of delayed payments/paychecks significant, which is how you end up with companies paying $$$ for extended support on discontinued HR and financial software.

It's the same reason companies will pay for GSuite and O365 subscriptions concurrently because a handful of departments refuse to give up their desktop applications and others have Excel-based workflows that do not work in Google Sheets and do not care enough to learn Python or find someone in the company who can write a better system.

[lelanthran]

> The entire perspective for how to use AI is through claude skills, claude projects, claude cowork, etc

But as they have repeatedly pointed out, creating software is almost zero-cost now, so software cannot be a moat.

After all, all of the Claude software can be vibe-coded by any competitor; that's the dream that Anthropic has been selling anyway...

[rsoto2]

doesn't matter. that just means they've incentivized all competitors to enter the market and let's be honest none of their tools are that novel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J2Fb1bBufA

[boron1006]

I guess I’m thinking a lot of companies seem to be getting Claude code subscriptions. It usually takes some time and effort for an org to switch away from one solution. In the meantime a lot of workflows get more and more tied to Claude in particular.

It’s not much of a moat, but it’s more than a lot of orgs have.

[bpavuk]

obligatory correction: the semiconductor layer is still owned by TSMC and Samsung. Google sketches chip designs for them to implement - that's the lowest layer they control. I am not denying that this is impressive.

[rsoto2]

google might have tons of integration. But if it invested too heavily into AI then it will also suffer when increased competition causes returns to fall:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J2Fb1bBufA