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Why is eval data a moat?

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Drawn from Lutz Finger's Forbes column, LinkedIn writing, and Cornell teaching. Sources are cited inline so you can read the originals.

Evaluation data as the strategic differentiator.

All of them matter, and all of them are being fought over. But the real value may sit in the one thing OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini have not yet made central: your own eval data. Sure, there is the occasional thumbs-up button. But who is really using that signal?

The Missing Moat In AI: Your Eval Data · Forbes

One cannot protect them easily. No Data Moat: general knowledge is widely available. My first startup faced this reality — services that commanded six-figure fees became available for $100 (a 1,000x price drop) once competitors caught up using the same machine learning algorithms. A Real Moat: Engineering Excellence — smart engineering work pushing the frontier of what is possible is a moat.

DeepSeek - New Economic Rules And Regulatory Challenge · Forbes


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