Information was always the moat for everything. We literally have spies who risk their lives to try to gain access to information.

I feel like algorithmic/architectural breakthroughs are still the area that will show the most wins. The thing is that insights/breakthroughs of that sort that tend to be highly portable. As Meta showed, you can just pay people 10 million to come tell you what they're doing over there at that other place.

inb4 "then why do Meta's models still suck?"

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?

Distribution, brand, network effects, regulatory positioning, and execution speed all create defensibility; "data helps" doesn't imply "data is everything"

Also as foundation models improve, today's "hard to solve" problems become tomorrow's "easy to solve" problems