Justin Searls writes:

I’ve been pairing with ChatGPT (using GPT-4) every day for the last few months and it is demonstrably terrible 80% of the time, but 20% of the time it saves me an hour of headaches, so I put up with it anyway. Nevertheless, my experience with Llama 2 was so miserable, I figured Zuck’s claim about Llama 3 outperforming GPT-4 was bullshit, so I put it to the test this morning.

…

I agree with John Gruber that OpenAI lacks a moat, but what they still have is a pretty significant head start in the “server-side large-language model” market. Meta and Google are still clearly playing catch-up there. In the long-term, though, OpenAI really does need to figure out a way to avoid being outflanked by the larger platforms.

Gruber writes:

I keep circling back to the notion that OpenAI has no moat. ChatGPT is certainly the best-known LLM, and perhaps still the best, but I don’t think that’s any more of a long-term competitive advantage than some company in 1986 having “the best C compiler”. What’s needed are ways to bring LLMs to users. To give them purpose, in products. That’s what Meta is doing, by integrating their AI into all of their major products.

Source: Daring Fireball: Meta Releases New AI Assistant Powered by Llama 3 Model

I think moats are too early to be commented on because nobody still really understands what parameters matter from a user perspective / business perspective. I think Justin's considering this from a "help me code" / code productivity angle while Gruber's looking at this from a has-this-hit-mainstream-yet angle?

In all these cases, early days is the answer.

That said, I still think that Gruber's giving credit where due - at least Meta's making a cohesive effort. Sure, they've just slapped on a text box to all their products at this point. However, anyone in a large company knows that coordinating all of this means that there's cohesive push from the top. That suggests that there are clear owners and there's execution. Personally, that's a muscle that will help facebook execute fast. They've already shown they've the necessary muscle to learn from mistakes so, I'm bullish.