points by fn-mote 2 days ago | 0 comments
A dry cleaner and a car wash can be a good business. Outsource things that are not your core competency. A moat means you can defend it better, but in this case your business can capture the value of them not having the IT person on staff and not having to spend the tokens. It’s a good old fashioned business.
[–] dalyons 2 days ago
a regular business is not a startup though. A startup implies a much higher ceiling on growth and profit. Worth investing in on a high risk, high multiple of return manner. An SME sized business is not that.
[–] daveguy 2 days ago
[–] keeda 2 days ago
Turns out there are ways to monetize commodities, to the tune of double-digit billions in revenue per quarter.
[–] adventured 2 days ago
So mighty Google can't manage it. But it's a commodity that's easily copied.
Somehow HN can't reconcile the contradiction even though it's laughably obvious.
Hey anybody could go MVP a ride hailing app over the weekend. It's a commodity app. Should be super easy with LLMs.
Oh shit, wait, you mean I'd have to take a billion users away from GPT and getting those users is now 50x harder than it was four years ago? You mean it's drastically harder to peel users away from existing services than if you get to start fresh? Ohhhh.
They have gigantic moats and so long as they don't do anything too stupid, those moats will just get stronger with time.
No VC is giving you money to try to run down OpenAI and Anthropic. Nobody is writing that $100 billion check. It's already over, HN is just in its standard denial phase.
[–] mrheosuper 2 days ago
So you could argue their moat is US government, not their model. I don't disagree with you, just saying what is their real moat.
[–] adventured 1 day ago
The Chinese models have no great branding with the masses, they have no service layer that any average user understands. Where does Joe go to use the Chinese model that he doesn't even know the name of? Joe has no clue what the difference between DeepSeek and Kimi is, and Joe will never know that.
They all know ChatGPT, they have all been trained on how to use it and what it is. The inertia is enormous and HNers endlessly undercount how that works because deep tech users all want to think the masses view tools like they do and approach tech like they do (which is entirely false).
OpenAI's future is as an ad platform in terms of its business. That's at least 2x-4x larger as a business opportunity than anything they have going on now. Which is to say $80-$160 billion minimum. That requires they maintain the giant userbase, we'll see how that goes. Losing it requires someone take it from them. Joe isn't just going to wake up tomorrow and go seek out how to use Kimi.
The LLM space is worth a minimum of half a trillion dollars per year in ad revenue. It will subsume all of search. Search becomes merely a service of an LLM, which will perform the function on your behalf. Google is on top of that shift, so OpenAI has its work cut out for it competing with Google there.
Of the US big three, Anthropic is by far the one most threatened by the persistence of the Chinese models. Anthropic will probably never stop being chased by them and will have to endlessly race to try to stay ahead. Anthropic has to figure out how to build out the LLM+ equivalent of AWS before China figures out how to beat them, ie build a very deep service / tool moat around Claude that the userbase gets stuck to. In short dramatically increase the difficulty in peeling away users, it has to become a big chore to switch (which eventually this is exactly what someone will figure out in that area of LLM competition).