OpenAI offers several services: completions (i.e. chat GPT), embeddings, moderation, whisper, etc. Of these, I am convinced that embeddings are the true vendor

OpenAI offers several services: completions (i.e. chat GPT), embeddings, moderation, whisper, etc. Of these, I am convinced that embeddings are the true vendor lock in of our time. Once you base everything on one company's embeddings engine, it will be very difficult to switch to another without significant cost / effort. As a concrete example, assume that embedding vectors are just two dimensional (in reality OpenAI's are 1536D). "cat" might map to [0.1, 0.9] in OpenAI while the same term maps to [0.7,0.3] in another company's engine. The mapping is completely non linear so matrix multiplication or other basic tools cannot be use to find a mapping. The "Rosetta stone" in this case is another massive LLM which would be exceedingly expensive to create. I'd posit that this will create a moat and OpenAI/MSFT are in a good position in this regard. Completions have such a simple API I can see this becoming almost as ubiquitous as s3. It will be trivial for companies to switch this aspect.