Moats in AI, facebook and OpenAI

Justin Searls writes:

I've been pairing with ChatGPT (using GPT-4) every day for the last few months and it is demonstrably terrible 80% of the time, but 20% of the time it saves me an hour of headaches, so I put up with it anyway. Nevertheless, my experience with Llama 2 was so miserable, I figured Zuck's claim about Llama 3 outperforming GPT-4 was bullshit, so I put it to the test this morning.

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I agree with John Gruber that OpenAI lacks a moat, but what they still have is a pretty significant head start in the "server-side large-language model" market. Meta and Google are still clearly playing catch-up there. In the long-term, though, OpenAI really does need to figure out a way to avoid being outflanked by the larger platforms.

Gruber writes:

I keep circling back to the notion that OpenAI has no moat. ChatGPT is certainly the best-known LLM, and perhaps still the best, but I don’t think that’s any more of a long-term competitive advantage than some company in 1986 having “the best C compiler”. What’s needed are ways to bring LLMs to users. To give them purpose, in products. That’s what Meta is doing, by integrating their AI into all of their major products.

Daring Fireball: Meta Releases New AI Assistant Powered by Llama 3 Model

I think moats are too early to be commented on because nobody still really understands what parameters matter from a user perspective / business perspective. I think Justin's considering this from a "help me code" / code productivity angle while Gruber's looking at this from a has-this-hit-mainstream-yet angle?

In all these cases, early days is the answer.

That said, I still think that Gruber's giving credit where due - at least Meta's making a cohesive effort. Sure, they've just slapped on a text box to all their products at this point. However, anyone in a large company knows that coordinating all of this means that there's cohesive push from the top. That suggests that there are clear owners and there's execution. Personally, that's a muscle that will help facebook execute fast. They've already shown they've the necessary muscle to learn from mistakes so, I'm bullish.