My comment on Apple was hardware investment of Apple users. Neither Google nor Apple's own store of hardware matter in the age of "the cloud" imo.
I would agree that moats are relative and companies can stay ahead without deep moats. But I think you still the problem of the specific way that LLMs are generic. Users don't invest in an LLM, they just learn to use them and that learning can transfer. User don't get "bragging rights" for using ChatGPT rather than a competitor (almost the opposite). ChatGPT output doesn't have a "flavor" distinct from other LLMs - in fact, as a user, I want the output flavor I ask for rather than anything identifiable as ChatGPT.
You mentioned list of "deep moats" and all of them are applicable to LLMs. Just to repeat "quality, habit and integration, hardware investment, their interface, their brand".
> quality,
All LLMs are actually converging to about the same LLM, since they are trained on the same Internet/book/average-human-knowledge.
> habit
Habit matter for things people don't pay for. If a person pays, they'll go out of their way to get something for less. Microsoft's big thing is making sure end users never pay for Windows.
> integration,
Not going to matter. Every "AI application" is basically just a prompt and users can make their own prompts.
> hardware investment,
OpenAI doesn't even have a hardware investment, just a deal to use MS Azure. Other AI companies can and will just a cloud too.
> their interface,
Every LLM has the same interface. A chat window.
> their brand"
As above, brand matters for either habit (which again, only matters when thing cheap or free), social signaling (which a LLM choice won't give you) or actual differences in quality (which LLMs don't have).
> since they are trained on the same Internet/book/average-human-knowledge.
By this logic every search engine should converge to same thing? Again I am not talking about current gen llm, just saying your assertion that the quality would remain converged forever isn't substantiated enough.
> Habit matter for things people don't pay for
This is so baseless and ridiculous. e.g. Excel/Adobe isn't ahead of competition for features.
> OpenAI doesn't even have a hardware investment
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/o...