I wrote about how I think OpenAI is going to kill it in advertisements here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46087109
Claude is kicking ass in coding but it seems like Codex is catching up fast. Claude Code's PR has taken a hit recently due to the lack of compute forcing Anthropic to dumb down the models. Codex has been gaining momentum.
Chip manufacturing aren't really differentiated either - it didn't stop TSMC from becoming the monopoly for high end chip nodes, capturing 90%+ of the advanced chip market. The reason they have is because Rock's Law makes it too expensive to build the next node unless you've generated enough revenue from the current node. I don't see why it isn't the same for SOTA models.
They would compete with Meta then which already does something like this but has mature AD tech
I understand your argument, but I think you might be overestimating the intent of the users when they're using chatgpt.
The ones killing on ads are Google, Meta, and Amazon.
I just don't see how ChatGPT will gobble those market shares - ads are increasingly tied to sales attribution, and it would require a complete shift of the market for ChatGPT to take over the role of those 3 players.
People will still try to look for content around the products they buy, or will shop for prices, or will look for feedback from other users of the product.
Chip manufacturing is insanely hard, it requires know-how, that's the moat. It's not money, otherwise the EU and China would have leading edge fabs.
Machine learning has no real moat. There's no network effect, it's not hard (you can just throw money at the problem). It's not data, because we have an existence proof that general intelligence can be trained by a few humans and a shelf full of books. The compute to do it is generally available. As soon as one organization releases open weights, everyone can use it immediately, even on modest local hardware.