If OpenAI has exclusive rights to AI generation for Disney and other IP rights holders, that would create the kind of moat they've been missing so far.
Disney is buying equity from OpenAI. You frame it as "giving OpenAI money" because you hold a (quite insane) assumption that OpenAI's equity is worth nothing.
Can you buy equity from OpenAI without also giving OpenAI a license to use your IP? Even if the equity is worth $1 billion, how much is Disney's IP license worth?
Thats a business agreement not a moat.
And you might have rights to generate the characters but they still need to do something. You only have to look at the repeated Disney flops to see they themselves have no ideas.
These kinds of parternships also throw in free inference with MFN clauses, which make a mutual moat.
A moat doesn't have to be a feature, and equity stakes have been fairly successful moats (eg. Much of AWS's ML services being powered by Anthropic models due to their equity stake in Anthropic).
A moat is a permanent feature protecting a castle against attack. That’s the metaphor. If it’s not their own device intrinsically protecting them then it’s not a moat in my book.
> That is not how we use the term "moat" in this context, because competitors eventually converge on offerings within 1-2 years.
Then I guess we need a new term because that's not how I interpret the term moat either. To me, ChatGPT chat history is a moat. It allows them to differentiate their product and competitors cannot copy it. If someone switches to a new AI service they will have to build their chat history from scratch.
By comparison a business deal that can be transferred to a new partner the second it expires is much more temporary.
But Sam Altman has already said that they need to be able to ignore copyright laws because the Chinese are going to ignore them too. How is access to Disney IP a moat if everyone involved (except Disney) gives no shits about copyright?
