Where is the LLM Moat?

It is clear that LLMs are becoming commoditized.

• OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI, DeepSeek, where is the competitive moat? There is no LLM moat. If you have the capital, you can build your own leading frontier LLM.

• xAI’s Grok 3 now sits atop the benchmarks (below). The leaderboard changes each week.

• As I have written a number of times - what companies build with LLMs will be where the true value creation occurs. These will be at the agent and application layers.

• Groq (a chip company I have mentioned a few times over the past year), enables inexpensive, high-performance LLM inference. Groq often pairs with Meta’s Llama open source LLMs. Groq is doing approximately $1.5 billion of revenue and hasn’t raised nearly the capital that cash-burning, overvalued OpenAI has.

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