Custom hardware, data centers, huge cash reserves, deep/broad talent pool, and non-AI customer base are all huge advantages if not moats.
Google, Microsoft, or Amazon are more likely to be the AI leaders than OpenAI or Anthropic.
If not now, then when will these companies be AI leaders?
Even Google, with its staggering advantages in cash, compute, real estate, training data, and having basically invented the field only manages to briefly claim a 1-2 week lead once or twice a year.
Google literally has billions of user that simply integrating it all with Gemini is massive undertaking
sure gemini is not frontier for coding but you know that is doesn't matters for google consumer
Google is already on gen 8 of its TPUs and is certainly already working on the next version or two.
This is the interesting part to me. People talk about a “SaaSpocalypse” because AI makes SaaS features cheap to copy, yet deeply embedded SaaS still accumulates integrations, data, and switching costs. Gemini is a good example: Google can put AI directly into Gmail, Docs, Drive, Search, etc., where people already work. Meanwhile, frontier-model performance leads often seem to disappear within months. Could model quality itself actually be a less durable moat than workflow and distribution? Curious where people who’ve worked in ML for a long time see the moat actually compounding.
I'm sure the thinking out there, and hence investment, is all about how to tether the user to the most addictive, network-effected, incredibly deep, server-side, moat-able version of AI possible.