The moat is around capital. For thousands of years most people were slaves or peasants whose cheap fungible labor was exploited.

For a brief period intellectual and skilled work has (had?) been valued and compensated, giving rise to a somewhat wealthy and empowered middle class. I fear those days are numbered and we’re poised to return to feudalism.

What is more likely, that LLMs lead to the flourishing of entrepreneurship and self determination? Or burgeoning of precariat gig workers barely hanging on? If we’re speaking of extremes, I find the latter far more likely.

I am also not seeing a moat on LLMs.

It seems like the equilibrium point for them a few years out will be that most people will be able to run good enough LLMs on local hardware through a combination of the fact that they don't seem to be getting much better due to input data exhaustion while various forms of optimization seem to be increasingly allowing them to run on lesser hardware.

But I still have generalized lurking amorphous concerns about where this all ends up because a number of actors in the space are certainly spending as if they believe a moat will magically materialize or can be constructed.

LLMs as we know them have no real moat, but few people genuinely believe that LLMs are sufficient as a platform for AGI. Whatever it takes to add object permanence and long-term memory assimilation to LLMs may not be so easy to run on your 4090 at home.