By Christoph Schütte in Analysis & Deep Dives — May 11, 2023

"We [Google] Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"

I just listened to the Latent Space podcast talking about the leaked Google memo about open source LLMs (via semianalysis).

The memo itself is highly interesting (and well written) but so are the rebuttals:

Some claimed that Luke Sernau (the author of the memo) does not seem to work in AI related parts of Google and “software engineers don’t understand moats”.
Emad Mostaque, himself a perma-champion of open source and open models, has repeatedly stated that “Closed models will always outperform open models” because closed models can just wrap open ones.
Emad has also commented on the moats he does see: “Unique usage data, Unique content, Unique talent, Unique product, Unique business model”, most of which Google does have, and OpenAI less so (though it is winning on the talent front).
Sam Altman famously said that “very few to no one is Silicon Valley has a moat - not even Facebook” (implying that moats don’t actually matter, and you should spend your time thinking about more important things)

The episode with Simon Willison, who also wrote a great recap of the No Moat memo, discusses the memo at length. Enjoy!