alt Hacker NewsWhat 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.
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Other models arent even close except for gpt 5.5. You're dead wrong on that. You read too many benchmarks and/or chinese propaganda. There hasn't been a serious contender in agentic SWE besides OAI and anthropic for a long time, and no chinese model has even reached opus 4.5 performance yet. The moat isnt insurmountable but it is very solid for at least a 12 month lead time. Which is such an insane amount of time in this landscape and industry. The moat is stretching, not shrinking, on agentic SWE. And that is literally the only moat that matters for RSI.
I think we agree?
What moat? You answered yourself: "capital intensive"
But, history says the supercomputer of today will fit in your pocket in a few years.
They've bought up all the RAM and GPUs, which pushes the capital requirements upward for everyone else. But, they can't corner the market forever, there are too many competing interests. AMD and Intel keep making new GPUs and APUs. 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).
They have a moat today, and it's just that it's really expensive to train and host frontier models, especially at commercial scale. It used to be there was also some secret sauce to making it fast and efficient. But, secret sauce is being published daily by all sorts of researchers, folks are figuring out how to do more with less and it often finds its way into llama.cpp or vLLM or SGLang within days or weeks.