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This makes me wonder if AI companies even have a MOAT in the first place.

All requests to an LLM are idempotent, for every API call you need to send it the entire conversation history so that it can process it. LLMs do not learn or remember anything, which makes it super easy for users to switch LLMs on the fly. Most popular AI frameworks, make this a one-liner change these days.

And that makes me wonder if the trillion dollar valuations for OpenAI and Claude are even justified. Cause if that is justified, then Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek etc are also valued at a trillion dollars. Or all of them are worth a lot less. One of those statements is true.

Also this makes me wonder if the next iteration of LLMs would be based on fine-tuning, where LLMs actually learn from your past behaviour so that it would grant some amount of stickiness to the product. OpenAI used to offer fine tuning runs for GPT-3.5, but they don't seem to do that anymore.

> All requests to an LLM are idempotent, for every API call you need to send it the entire conversation history

A more appropriate term is “stateless”. LLM responses are certainly not idempotent, as they are not even deterministic.

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> This makes me wonder if AI companies even have a MOAT in the first place.

They don't. The moat will mainly be the tooling around AI, not the AI itself. You don't hear any company claiming their moat is the Internet.

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With their current API approach they're essentially a commodity. They need to start moving parts of the harness behind the API, otherwise they'll remain a commodity.

Recursive self-improvement changes the parameters a bit, especially for the market-leaders, and it's the one thing that makes me wonder if they'll be able to extend their lead faster than the smaller labs can keep up, but it's an option available to everyone.

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> Cause if that is justified, then Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek etc are also valued at a trillion dollars

It’s more like a bunch of people are placing different bets. Only a few bets are going to generate a return, possibly only one, but the profit on that one bet will make it all worthwhile. That’s the theory, anyway.

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