Google "We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI"

Another issue is low tech defensibility. In the AI world tech defensibility is harder to achieve because new/revolutionary models are being developed mostly in open, academic settings and so are available in open source.

Open-source projects—not just commercial open source—have served as a critical driver for the improvement of products for decades. However, some software is going to remain closed source. It’s just the nature of first-mover advantage. But when transparency and extensibility are an issue, an open-source successor becomes a real threat.

Many of the largest scale uses of AI to date have been at consumer-centric companies that have large data sets to train on (Google, Facebook, Uber, etc). Perhaps incumbents won due to a data advantage that is now going away as companies use the broader internet as an initial training set + are switching to models that work more robustly against sma... See more