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OpenAI has a gigantic moat.

No moat means Joe Anybody can compete with them. You just need billions in capital, a zillion GPUs, thousands of hyper skilled employees. You need to somehow get the attention of tens of millions of consumers (and then pull them away from the competition, ha).

Sure.

The same premise was endlessly floated about eg Uber and Google having no moats (Google was going to be killed by open search, Baidu, magic, whatever). These things are said by people that don't understand the comically vast cost of big infrastructure, branding, consumer lock-in (or consumer behavior in general), market momentum, the difficulty of raising enormous sums of capital, and so on.

Oh wait the skeptics say: what about DeepSeek. To scale and support that you're going to need what I described. What's the plan for supporting 100 million subscribers globally with a beast of an LLM that wants all the resources you can muster? Yeah, that's what I thought. Oh but wait, everyone is going to run a datacenter out of their home and operate their own local LLM, uhh nope. It's overwhelmingly staying in the cloud and it's going to cost far over a trillion dollars to power it globally over the next 20 years.

OpenAI has the same kind of moat that Google has, although their brand/reach/size obviously isn't on par at this point.




Microsoft is providing the compute, the capital, and if 365 Copilot takes off, also the consumers.

Microsoft has a mote. Oai does not.


365 is not taking off. Numbers are average at best. Most companies now pay 20/user/month extra, and whilst the sentiment is that it likely kina is somehow worth it, nobody claims it would be better than break even. Many users are deeply disappointed with the overpromising in powerpoint and excel. Sure it's quite useful in outlook and the assistant is great to find files in scattered sharepoints, but that's the limit of my value with it.

OpenAI copilot, not microsoft copilot, actually looks like a stronger product and they're going full force after the enterprise market as we speak. We're setting a demo in motion with them next month to give it a go.

We'll have to wait for the first one to crack Powerpoint, that'll be the gamechanger.




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