With the right vision, agility and execution, businesses can build rich AI offerings and compete head-to-head with market leaders.
Building a pure technology moat has become challenging since the emergence of large language models (LLMs). Due to the lower barriers of entry for introducing new products to the market and the continuous fear of becoming outdated overnight, existing businesses, startups and investors are all trying to find a path to sustainable competitive advantage.
However, this new landscape also presents an opportunity to establish a different kind of moat, one based on a much wider product offering solving multiple pain points for customers and automating large workflows from start to finish.
The AI explosion, whose blast radius has kept growing since the public launch of GPT3.5/ChatGPT, has been mind-blowing. In addition to the discussions around efficiencies and risks, businesses in the space found themselves dealing relentlessly with the question of whether building a technology moat is still possible.
Companies are struggling with the realities of creating a defendable product with substantial entry barriers for new competitors or incumbents. Just as in the past, this will continue to be a necessary component for a new business to be able to grow and become a centaur or unicorn.Open-source models the real revolution
The real revolution isn’t just ChatGPT. The real revolution includes open-source models becoming available for commercial use — for free. Additionally, solutions such as LoRA are allowing anyone to retrain open-source models on specific datasets quickly and economically.
The reality is that while OpenAI kicked off the era of the “democratization of AI,” the open-source community kicked off the era of the “democratization of Software.
