OpenAI’s technical advantage disappeared faster than most expected.
OpenAI’s model moat expired quickly after ChatGPT launched. We saw BARD, LLaMA, FLAN UL2, BLOOM, and then Stanford’s Alpaca, a variant of Meta’s LLaMA cross-trained by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5. Everyone is now fine-tuning and cross-training models based on other models. A model moat does not exist for OpenAI. This is not surprising, such a moat also did not exist in previous Machine Learning waves. The only argument is that LLMs are expensive to train, so there’s a barrier to entry, not a model moat.
— What Is The Competitive Advantage Of LLMs Like ChatGPT For Your Business? Three Takeaways. · Forbes