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Data is the only moat

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Re: Data is the only moat

#21

Post by PaulHoule »

Nevermark wrote: post #16

Data. Vertical integration. Horizontal integration. Cross- and/or mass-relationship integration. Individual relationship investment/artifacts. Reputation for reliability, stability, or any other desired dimension. Constant visibility in the news (good, neutral, sometimes even bad!) A consistent attractive story or narrative around the brand. A consistent selective story or narrative around the brand. People prefer pr…

AI-based product that slips past the defenses of people who think they hate AI, get turned off by branding like Copilot + PC, etc. A lot of people are really hoping it all dries up and blows away the way NFTs did.

Or maybe the honest to God non-dull tool that has nothing to do with AI. Like a Photoshop clone that does everything in linear light, makes gorgeous images, and doesn't crash when you open the font chooser.

Re: Data is the only moat

#23

Post by NiloCK »

Data has historically been a moat, but I think now more than ever it's a moat of bounded size / utility.

The biggest data hoarders now compress their data into oracles whose job is to say whatever to whoever - leaking an ever-improving approximation of the data back out.

DeepSeek was a big early example of adversarial distillation, but it seems inevitable to me that frontier models can and will always be siphoned off in order to produce reasonably strong fast-follow grey market competition.

Re: Data is the only moat

#24

Post by visarga »

Nevermark wrote: post #16

Data. Vertical integration. Horizontal integration. Cross- and/or mass-relationship integration. Individual relationship investment/artifacts. Reputation for reliability, stability, or any other desired dimension. Constant visibility in the news (good, neutral, sometimes even bad!) A consistent attractive story or narrative around the brand. A consistent selective story or narrative around the brand. People prefer pr…

Context is the moat, you can't eat so that I feel satiated, my context my benefits, it is nonfungible

Re: Data is the only moat

#25

Post by bloppe »

Nevermark wrote: post #16

Data. Vertical integration. Horizontal integration. Cross- and/or mass-relationship integration. Individual relationship investment/artifacts. Reputation for reliability, stability, or any other desired dimension. Constant visibility in the news (good, neutral, sometimes even bad!) A consistent attractive story or narrative around the brand. A consistent selective story or narrative around the brand. People prefer pr…

Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!

Re: Data is the only moat

#26

Post by weinzierl »

Why is it that we have agents that can prospect for sales leads and answer support tickets accurately, but we don’t seem to be able to consistently generate high quality slides?

I don't know about prospecting, but "answer support tickets accurately"? Seriously, this must be ironic, right?

Re: Data is the only moat

#27

Post by jondwillis »

Nevermark wrote: post #16

Data. Vertical integration. Horizontal integration. Cross- and/or mass-relationship integration. Individual relationship investment/artifacts. Reputation for reliability, stability, or any other desired dimension. Constant visibility in the news (good, neutral, sometimes even bad!) A consistent attractive story or narrative around the brand. A consistent selective story or narrative around the brand. People prefer pr…

n to the limit

Re: Data is the only moat

#28

Post by ares623 »

iwontberude wrote: post #11
jongjong wrote: post #6

Attention is the only moat. Companies always try to make it seem like data is valuable. Attention is valuable. With attention, you get the data for free. What they monetize is attention. Data is a small part to optimize the sale of ads but attention is the important commodity. Why else are celebrities so well paid?

Corruption is the only moat. Oligarchs can buy anything and funnel attention and money into it, creating financial success for shareholders despite poor leadership, zero social responsibility, suboptimal ideas and execution (see: Tesla) Just commit fraud repeatedly while owning the people who run DoJ, easy peasy, no amount of attention or cash flow can displace that.

Go further. Violence (or the threat of it) is the only moat.

Re: Data is the only moat

#29

Post by crabmusket »

aero142 wrote: post #18
andy99 wrote: post #15

What if the only moat is domains where it’s hard to judge (non superficial) quality? Code generation, you don’t see what’s wrong right away, it’s only later in project lifecycle that you pay for it. Writing looks good to skim, is embarrassingly bad once you start reading it. Some things (slides apparently) you notice right away how crappy they are. I don’t think it’s just better training data, I think LLMs apply larg…

If had to answer this question 2 years ago, I wouldn't have said software was a "don't see it's bad until later" category, with compilers and it needing to actually do something very specific. However, business slides are full of exacting facts and definitely never contains generic business speak masquerading as real insight /s. This feels like telling a story after the fact to make it fit.

I agree, and by all accounts the success of coding agents is due to code being amenable to very fast feedback (tests, screenshots) so you can immediately detect bad code.

That's in terms of functionality, not necessarily quality though. But linters can provide some quick feedback on that in limited ways.

Re: Data is the only moat

#30

Post by hmry »

weinzierl wrote: post #26

Why is it that we have agents that can prospect for sales leads and answer support tickets accurately, but we don’t seem to be able to consistently generate high quality slides? I don't know about prospecting, but "answer support tickets accurately "? Seriously, this must be ironic, right?

It's great to hear you've already tried X twice. But have you tried reading our FAQ section on X? Also, try using this setting that doesn't exist or this dialog that was removed in 2022
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