I disagree, the moat will be of those holding rights for valuable problem domain specific training data. Examples I can think of:
Adobe sits on a treasure trove of:
- Copyrighted multimedia
- Years of telemetry on content creation
Zeiss sits on decades of data:
- Medical imaging, and surgical footage.
- Silicon waffer inspection.
These embody a training corpus that is de facto (lawfully) out of reach of the crawler scrapper approaches of Google/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic (even if they pirate the seas for torrents like before).
Neither Adobe or Zeiss are an AI power house but the barrier to entry has also dropped with all the movement in the field.
Excellent point, and one that’s not raised enough in these conversations.