Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer

They say there is no moat, but in fact, a feature in anthropic takes a good few months up to a year to appear on openai chatapp, and the same is true vice versa.

You could say some of those issues are solvable by allocating more money, and resources, which might be true, and it could be true that it would be beneficial for openai to develop their own cursor platform in the future, to get better margins. But in reality, who knows when that future would come? Maybe by then cursor will have much more moat and entering the market would be much more difficult. Maybe openai will continue developing their core product and entering other domains will not be worth the effort.

Currently, LLMs as a product have not been solved. All companies operate at a lose in order to rise the top, and we still don't know how it will be monetized in the future. But as it stands - there is already moat, moat in infrastructure - even though a few years ago they said that llms have no moat, now there is already a strong set of features and "agents" that deliver us the deep reasoning, online searching, and multimodal experience.

So, there is moat. But moat can accumulate over time. For the article to be true - it should prove the the current moat is low, and it can not accumulate.

This logistical leg is where most of the work is done since you have to:

Maintain large slush funds for bribing law enforcement.

Run workshops and technicians that strip civilians cars, embed cocaine in the nooks and hand them over to American civilians to drive over the border.

Hire engineers from Pakistani universities to build narco-submarines in riverine deltas, which are then used to cross the Atlantic for European supplies.

Maintain contact with your African coastal syndicates who have another trans-Saharan route for getting drugs into Europe.

Run payroll for your workforce (this is a business after all).

Maintain a decently trained fighting force to slaughter enemies that encroach on your turf. Or informants, uncompromising cops, politicians, etc. This includes training, paying, initiating them, and hiring good experienced fighters. Right now, it's credibly reported that Mexican cartels are volunteering to fight in Ukraine to gain experience with drones and other UAVs to expand their war-making capabilities.

Hire chemistry undergrads from local STEM universities to turn synthetic precursors from Asia into fentanyl, etc.

So, just like African cocoa farmers and American growers see just a tiny slice of the profit the end-products produce, the cartels are in the logistics & firepower business; they've outsourced a huge chunk of the business to growers, just like their peers in the chocolate and grocery business.