Tech businesses this decade are about building channels and then selling things down that channel. Moat is a bit of an odd analogy today; it's how defensible these channels are.<p>OpenAI's channel is ChatGPT. Google has well, Google. Microsoft has Windows and Bing. Apple has the iPhone, Mac, Siri.<p>Sometimes AI <i>is</i> the moat - if Bing has AI and Google does not, people might be using Bing more. Or that's the theory at least. What's scarier for Google is that the channel is Google itself and if people are searching via ChatGPT, then Google might go the way of Stack Overflow.<p>Smart people also factor in delays in metrics. People often say, "Look, everyone is still using Google! ChatGPT is hype!!!" But when did people stop using Yahoo? Many stopped using Stack Overflow 5 years ago shortly after they fired Monica, but the failure of Stack Overflow is due to the lack of quality answers since then, and yet has been blamed on ChatGPT.<p>People will stop using Google likely 5 years after the answer are lower quality than on ChatGPT. This happened years back. My default tech search is through Cursor today.<p>Once Google's moat dries up, everything else has trouble too - Gdrive, Gdocs, Gmail, Gmeet, Gcloud. If MS were to stop doing Windows, they wouldn't be as successful selling MS Office and MS Teams wouldn't have the dominance it has over Slack.<p>As for OpenAI, ChatGPT is the channel, and they're starting to sell things down that channel. Custom GPTs didn't work. Assistants and their built in RAG is actually pretty good. You can spend a month hiring someone skilled to make a fully custom chatbot. Or use theirs and have one up in a few days. It's more expensive but still less than $100, cheaper than an engineer or the CS people you'd use otherwise.<p>The magic isn't better AI products, it's products that can be used by a more mainstream market. Excel was one of the best consumer markets out there because it gave everyone low-code capabilities for work. Gmail made it unnecessary to know what POP3 and SMTP are.<p>tldr: Even if people can get higher quality for cheaper, most aren't going to install Deepseek and Deepseek doesn't have a channel to sell on.