alt Hacker News>How will the Google/Anthropic/OpenAI's of the world make money on AI if open models are competitive with their models?
According to Google (or someone at Google) no organization has moat on AI/LLM [1]. But that does not mean that it is not hugely profitable providing it as SaaS even you don't own the model or Model as a Service (MaaS). The extreme example is Amazon providing MongoDB API and services. Sure they have their own proprietary DynamoDB but for the most people scale up MongoDB is more than suffice. Regardless brand or type of databases being used, you paid tons of money to Amazon anyway to be at scale.
Not everyone has the resource to host a SOTA AI model. On top of tangible data-intensive resources, they are other intangible considerations. Just think how many company or people host their own email server now although the resources needed are far less than hosting an AI/LLM model?
Google came up with the game changing transformer at its backyard and OpenAI temporarily stole the show with the well executed RLHF based system of ChatGPT. Now the paid users are swinging back to Google with its arguably more superior offering. Even Google now put AI summary as its top most search return results for free to all, higher than its paid advertisement clients.
[1]Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”:
That quote from Google is 2.5 years old.