The leaked internal Google memo "We have no moat" [1] was really prescient. It foresaw all of these proprietary models losing out to open-weight models.
Entirely possible that none of the big incumbents ends up winning, economically.
I would like a reassessment of that. This was 2023. I imagine the only ones filling the moat is Chinese labs, but there are other significant obststacles for even Chinese models. Even if they would become as good as their American counterparts, the distribution and inference is mostly in the ballpark of Anthropic and OpenAI.
But I don’t know anything, so I would love to hear other opinions.
If anything, it's becoming more true. In the last month you already have Kimi K3 reaching competitive frontier performance (in practice, a bit behind Fable/Sol but close enough). Sure, it's a chinese model but the reality is it puts dramatic pricing pressure on the main players. And these models are now getting good enough to actually help accelerate further AI model research which would suggest the gap might close even more in the near future.