5 ms·

It's an ironic situation; logically what should be the moat are the models, costing hundreds of millions of investment cost to train and operate so it would mak

It's an ironic situation; logically what should be the moat are the models, costing hundreds of millions of investment cost to train and operate so it would make sense if we see different provider focusing in different directions. But right now we have 3-5 top contenders that are so evenly matched that the de-facto sticking point is mostly the harness, ie. the collection of proven plugins/commands/tools/agent features that are tuned to the users personal workflow.

wonnage 6mo ago
Cost is never a good moat.
- dd82 6mo ago
  the companies migrating off vmware due to broadcom shittiness would disagree with you https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/02/most-vmware-users-still-actively-reducing-their-vmware-footprint-survey-finds/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/02/most-... CloudBolt’s survey also examined how respondents are migrating workloads off of VMware. Currently, 36 percent of participants said they migrated 1–24 percent of their environment off of VMware. Another 32 percent said that they have migrated 25–49 percent; 10 percent said that they’ve migrated 50–74 percent of workloads; and 2 percent have migrated 75 percent or more of workloads. Five percent of respondents said that they have not migrated from VMware at all. Among migrated workloads, 72 percent moved to public cloud infrastructure as a service, followed by Microsoft’s Hyper-V/Azure stack (43 percent of respondents). Overall, 86 percent of respondents “are actively reducing their VMware footprint,” CloudBolt’s report said.
  - latchkey 6mo ago
    It is easier to do in the cloud than it is to do with actual hardware though, because you'll need enough hardware to do the migration. There is a capital moat around that. I feel like the company that can figure out how to 100% safely live migrate any VMWare workload to another "cheaper" solution, will do quite well.
groestl 6mo ago
> are so evenly matched It's because the real value of the models is in what we (humanity) fed them, and all of them have eaten the same thing for free.
- nradov 6mo ago
  That's why the frontier LLM companies are now spending a lot more to license exclusive proprietary training data from private sources in order to gain a quality edge in certain business domains.
  - ajross 6mo ago
    That sounds like spin to me. If there were a clear "quality edge" in "certain business domains" stemming from "exclusive proprietary data", someone would have been exploiting it already using meat computers. But no, businesses are dumb. They always have been. Existing businesses get disrupted by new ideas and new technology all the time. This very site is a temple to disruption! Proprietary advantage is, 99.999% of the time, just structural advantage. You can't compete with Procter & Gamble because they already built their brands and factories and supply chains and you'd have to do all that from scratch while selling cheaper products as upstart value options. And there's not enough money in consumer junk to make that worth it. But if you did have funding and wanted to beat them on first principles? Would you really start by training an LLM on what they're already doing? No, you'd throw money at a bunch of hackers from YC. Duh.
    - nradov 6mo ago
      The quality edge hasn't shown up yet. If this strategy actually works then the quality improvements will only become apparent in the next round of major LLM updates. There's a lot of valuable training data locked up behind corporate firewalls. But this is all somewhat speculative for now.
    - linkregister 6mo ago
      Frontier labs are paying the same constellation of firms offering proprietary data and access to experts in their fields to train LLMs. They are neck-and-neck only because they are participating in the arms race. The only other way to keep up is mass-distillation, which could prove to be fragile (so far it seems to be sustainable).
ryandvm 6mo ago
Ironic indeed. The Great Replacers of white collar jobs are finding themselves easily replaceable. Delicious.

wonnage 6mo ago

Cost is never a good moat.

dd82 6mo ago
the companies migrating off vmware due to broadcom shittiness would disagree with you https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/02/most-vmware-users-still-actively-reducing-their-vmware-footprint-survey-finds/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/02/most-... CloudBolt’s survey also examined how respondents are migrating workloads off of VMware. Currently, 36 percent of participants said they migrated 1–24 percent of their environment off of VMware. Another 32 percent said that they have migrated 25–49 percent; 10 percent said that they’ve migrated 50–74 percent of workloads; and 2 percent have migrated 75 percent or more of workloads. Five percent of respondents said that they have not migrated from VMware at all. Among migrated workloads, 72 percent moved to public cloud infrastructure as a service, followed by Microsoft’s Hyper-V/Azure stack (43 percent of respondents). Overall, 86 percent of respondents “are actively reducing their VMware footprint,” CloudBolt’s report said.
- latchkey 6mo ago
  It is easier to do in the cloud than it is to do with actual hardware though, because you'll need enough hardware to do the migration. There is a capital moat around that. I feel like the company that can figure out how to 100% safely live migrate any VMWare workload to another "cheaper" solution, will do quite well.

groestl 6mo ago

> are so evenly matched It's because the real value of the models is in what we (humanity) fed them, and all of them have eaten the same thing for free.

nradov 6mo ago
That's why the frontier LLM companies are now spending a lot more to license exclusive proprietary training data from private sources in order to gain a quality edge in certain business domains.
- ajross 6mo ago
  That sounds like spin to me. If there were a clear "quality edge" in "certain business domains" stemming from "exclusive proprietary data", someone would have been exploiting it already using meat computers. But no, businesses are dumb. They always have been. Existing businesses get disrupted by new ideas and new technology all the time. This very site is a temple to disruption! Proprietary advantage is, 99.999% of the time, just structural advantage. You can't compete with Procter & Gamble because they already built their brands and factories and supply chains and you'd have to do all that from scratch while selling cheaper products as upstart value options. And there's not enough money in consumer junk to make that worth it. But if you did have funding and wanted to beat them on first principles? Would you really start by training an LLM on what they're already doing? No, you'd throw money at a bunch of hackers from YC. Duh.
  - nradov 6mo ago
    The quality edge hasn't shown up yet. If this strategy actually works then the quality improvements will only become apparent in the next round of major LLM updates. There's a lot of valuable training data locked up behind corporate firewalls. But this is all somewhat speculative for now.
  - linkregister 6mo ago
    Frontier labs are paying the same constellation of firms offering proprietary data and access to experts in their fields to train LLMs. They are neck-and-neck only because they are participating in the arms race. The only other way to keep up is mass-distillation, which could prove to be fragile (so far it seems to be sustainable).

ryandvm 6mo ago

Ironic indeed. The Great Replacers of white collar jobs are finding themselves easily replaceable. Delicious.