Item — HN Reader

I have to disagree with the central thesis. Disclosure, I’m building snazzy.ai, a company that utilizes GPT-3.

Counter to the article, GPT-3 isn’t the moat, the moat is the company you build around it. It’s your positioning, your team, your UI, etc.

GPT-3 is just another tool and if you treat it as a building block, then it can be part of what helps build a great company.

1 comments

It will never be a key differentiator for your company, since someone else can add it very easily to their product. There is also no network effect moat (i.e. Facebook), or data collection moat (i.e. Google).

Sure, you can build a little bit of UI around it, and maybe you have some prompts which you've refined, but that's about the only advantage you'll have over anyone else.

At the end of the day, I suspect OpenAI will be the only big winner in the GPT-3 space.

GPT-3 is just the enabling technology, what you do with the tool is where a company differentiates itself.

The key argument the article and your comment is making is that GPT-3 is the moat. There’s so much more to a company than just a piece of tech implemented within in.

Network effect and data collection are growth loops that exist separately from the technology and can be effectively layered into a company regardless of the underlying tech.

The clear winner is still OpenAI. Who's to say that established companies can do the exact same thing even with the OpenAI GPT-3 API.

I can see Google doing this and they also have many options here to remain competitive. They too can access this API, Google DeepMind can create another AI as a Service service similar to OpenAI or directly clone your idea as a feature in another product.

OpenAI has now become the AWS of AI services. I won't be suprised to see DeepMind thinking of doing the same thing.