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Comment by m3kw9 | Hacker News Reader

In fact they do, it’s called servers, GPUs, scale. You need them to train new models and to serve them. They also have speed and in AI speed is a non traditional moat. They got crazy connections too because of Sam. All of that together becomes a moat that someone just can’t do a “Facebook clone” on OpenAI

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Someone certainly can "Facebook clone" OpenAI. Google, Meta and Apple all are more well capitalized than OpenAI, operate at a larger scale and are actively training and publishing their own models.

Not anyone, it would be tough. You could also say the same that any one of these companies can do a Facebook clone, but it won’t be easy

I’m building several commercial projects with LLMs at the moment. 4o mini has been sufficient, and is also super cheap. I don’t need better reasoning at this point, I just need commodification, and so I’ll be using it for each product right up to the point that it gets cheaper to move up the hosting chain a little with Llama, at which point I won’t be giving any money to them.

They’ve built a great product, the price is good, but it’s entirely unclear to me that they’re continue to offer special sauce here compared to the competition.

OpenAI is dependent on Microsoft for GPUs, who are in turn dependent on Nvidia for GPUs. It’s nearly the least moat-y version of this out there.

Used to be when they had no money

Money doesn't just give you hyperscaler datacenters or custom silicon competitive with Nvidia GPUs. Money and 5 years might, but as this shows, OpenAI only really has a 1.5 year runway at the moment, and you can't build a datacenter in that time, let alone perfect running them at scale, same with chip design.

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