A lot of people are claiming that OpenAI has no moat, but so far they are clearly the market leader, and "chatgpt" has become an everyday word for LLMs, similarly to how "google" became an everyday word for search 20 years ago.<p>Why is Google still printing money on Search 20 years later? Surely at this point the know-how to build a search engine at scale is out there. It is a 2-sided marketplace, first they captured people's habits, then advertiser dollars. It could be that in the end LLM usage will also be ad-driven, in which case this will be captured by OpenAI most likely, similar to the Google case.<p>Another case. Why is Outlook the market leader for corporate email, even though email protocols are open standards, and there is no shortage of open source alternatives, etc. The reason is bundling of course and various other IT considerations, such as trainig/certs/control/security. Imo we don't really know yet how the LLM space will play out, what will enable (or not) OpenAI to win beyond the first years.<p>Of course there _were_ cases when the moat wasn't there, or was quickly disappeared, eg. Netscape's business melted away as soon as Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows.<p>Personally I think OpenAI still has a good 10x growth ahead (eg. 100M paid users for ChatGPT at the $20/mo-ish pricepoint) if they just maintain the current lead on the rest of the pack, and probably the API income can similarly be scaled up. At the slow-moving Retail company I work at, all the execs have been talking about AI for the last 2 years, but we still don't have a single AI feature in production in any of our apps, so we're not yet contributing to OpenAI revenues. But we will soon, as will 1000s of other slow-moving BigCos.