logoalt Hacker News

ordinaryradicalyesterday at 8:47 PM6 repliesview on HN

It feels like the market is full Wiley Coyote on frontier model makers, and I like Anthropic's B2B business model.

But all progress points to a commodification of foundation models--Google first named it as "we have no moat, neither does anyone else." So there must be some secondary play driving this, right? Hardware sales? Hedging for search ad revenue?

Still feels mispriced. I think asset inflation leaves too much money desperate for the Next Big Thing.


Replies

zapharyesterday at 8:50 PM

Google does have a sort of temporary moat. They have a much better hardware supply line story than anyone else and the revenue to maintain that edge indefinitely.

show 3 replies
mhitzayesterday at 9:01 PM

I haven't thought about any secondary play, but if these companies converge on Google's TPUs, they would probably eagerly slice from NVIDIA's current market.

> In September 2025, Google is in talks with several "neoclouds," including Crusoe and CoreWeave, about deploying TPU in their datacenter. In November 2025, Meta is in talks with Google to deploy TPUs in its AI datacenters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit

show 1 reply
kranke155yesterday at 10:28 PM

We have no moat could be a bad assessment. First, the models have personalities, and that matters. I like talking Claude better. OpenAI is really different from Grok. The ai models are an extension of the main concern of the company they’re in.

Also those personalities, quirks and choices accumulate. A lot of people talk about using Claude Code and Codex for different things. This is 100% my experience. Some people make better models, but on the top 3, there are often differences that are fixed only by switching between them. If I feel the need to switch between them, then there are significant enough differences and those differences will accumulate.

iamdeliriumyesterday at 9:09 PM

"we have no moat, neither does anyone else." is just an employee's personal work blog

onlyrealcuzzotoday at 12:30 AM

You don't need a moat if you're selling shovels and everyone's digging holes.

UltraSaneyesterday at 10:06 PM

YouTube is a kind of moat for Google.

show 1 reply