alt Hacker NewsThe moat looks deep today but it's going to become more shallow every year.
Training a new model from scratch takes serious resources. Post-training/fine-tuning an existing model, dramatically less. The knowledge for the process was esoteric two years ago, now you can ask a current model (one of several) to walk you through it, while building the tools to do it as you go. Several of my recent weekend projects have been exactly that sort of thing, just so I understand it better. "Let's make a LoRA", "let's generate a corpus of training data for fine-tuning a model for X task", "how can I put my face in a text-to-image model?" stuff like that. All of this is do-able on kinda modest local hardware (a couple of old GPUs or a Strix Halo or DGX Spark or big Mac Studio), or for a few bucks or a few hundred bucks or a few thousand bucks of cloud compute, depending on scale.
Scale that up to corporate or startup scale, with the money that's been flowing into AI for the past couple/few years, and it's obviously there's going to be a lot of competition just as the top model makers need to start ringing the cash register. That's a lot of opportunities for people to look at their ballooning Claude usage costs and find other ways to do the same thing for drastically less money. $100/month or $200/month is a no-brainer for Claude Code with probably the best model for coding, but they're pushing more users to usage-based billing which becomes cost-prohibitive real fast.
So, they desperately need to continue to be among the only ways to solve the hardest problems, and they need the alternatives to cost a similar amount. They can count on OpenAI and Google to ratchet up prices, too. They probably can't count on everybody, especially the vendors in China with different economics, to do it. And, they can't count on companies to look at their own usage and not ask, "Can we train a smaller specialist model that does this one thing we're using the Anthropic API most heavily for?"
I'm hoping they just mean stuff like using Claude for distillation by e.g. Chinese model makers, and not "how do I fine-tune Gemma 4 to write more like me?" or whatever.
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<The memory makers can't just sell to only AI companies forever, if they do Chinese manufacturers will move in and eventually eat them from below (as has happened many times before)>
Unfortunately this has been happening almost forever. You can spend 10s of thousands of $$ design, prototyping, building & marketing anything, whether a physical product or software & some company where the wages are lower are going to come along, build it cheaper (not necessarily better quality either) and ship it to the world.
As a result, the other countries import more stuff "because it is cheaper" and eventually local manufacturing dwindles away to virtually nothing. That is the case here in Australia. Our manufacturing base has shrunk to stuff all compared to what we had 30 years ago & as a result we are poorer as a nation for it
Given that Anthropic has never released anything open weights I wouldn’t count on the fact that they view finetuning Gemma 4 as something allowable. I think they think nobody other than Anthropic should have AI
> The moat looks deep today
Does it? What can this model do that I both want and cannot already do?
Anthropic made a nice little post saying how dangerous it is, because it is good enough to eat their own business. But I don't want to eat their business. They also said it was good at playing Slay the Spire, but I can't think of anything more insulting than have a machine do that in my place. That's MY comfort game, not something for a stupid Clanker to take away.
They did not provide any other use case.
What makes you say usage billing is cost prohibitive? I use as much flagship model as I could possibly want and it's like four figures a month. That's totally doable compared to SWE pay.
The moat is not the model, it's the harness. I wager that's one of the main reasons why Google made Antigravity closed source.
There is no training from scratch though. It's kind of, "first create the universe" framing pretention. All models rely heavily on the large corpus that humanity built through large span of time. And of course humanity didn't create the condition of its emergence.
What moat? There are multiple companies providing pareto-optimal frontier models, and it takes O(10) people to build one of these things.
The rest is capital intensive, and the price will approach the cost of production over time.
Thinking this is a profitable endeavor is equivalent to claiming coal plants have good margins because boilers are expensive.