I think the fixation on numbers of tokens and dollars per token is missing the point a bit. LLMs are quite useless without good tools. The article calls out sea

I think the fixation on numbers of tokens and dollars per token is missing the point a bit. LLMs are quite useless without good tools. The article calls out search as one of them. And it's important. If you are coding, the tools are relatively easy: they are mostly open source and don't have a lot of authorization logic around them. Anyone with access to python and some access to a half decent AI model can pull together a decent agentic coding tool. There are many examples out there. But if you look at the overall market, there's a rapid shift happening to non-coding tools and non programmer users starting to become very active. This kicked off beginning of the year with Claude Cowork. OpenAIs Codex and ChatGPT (they both have the same plugin infrastructure) is doing a lot of the same things. I've talked to a lot of non technical business users in recent months. There's a growing amount of people who definitely have zero interest in programming starting to use these tools and getting value out of them. This is going to rapidly scale to essentially most white collar users. Programming tools are becoming a side show to this market. The difference here is that these people need connections to all their favorite protected data SAAS silos: MS office, Sales Force, Outlook, Gmail & GSuite, Calendar, SAP, Oracle, etc. The moat here is very different: it's mediated access to these silos in a compliant way. Anthropic announced a solution in the form of some MCP features. Those features boil down to getting access to all your favorite silos, if you sign in with the right identity provider. What's the right identity provider? The one that's whitelisted by the data silos you are locked into. Okta seems to have weaseled themselves into a position of power here. And it's all the other usual suspects. We'll see who is going to "win" that race but I bet it's going to be a pretty exclusive club with zero outsiders from China on that list. You can hack your way around some of those limitations. But doing so in a compliant way is going to be tricky. And that's before you consider who's going to pay for this and what they are going to insist on. Corporate IT departments & data security policy compliance basically. What's the moat here? Secure & compliant access to all your favorite silos. Here in the EU that also includes data residency. The difference between sending all your data to Silicon Valley or Beijing is that of getting stabbed or getting shot. If it leaves the EU, you have a huge compliance issue. Most of the juicy corporate LLM usage is going to have to be fully compliant. I.e. hosted and controlled in the EU. This will be the same across the world. The least important choice right now is which model you use. The most important ones are about where those models run and what tools the models running there have access to and how that is governed. On paper, OpenAI, Anthropic, MS, and Google are pretty well positioned here. Not necessarily in that order. Most others are still figuring it out. But they'll have a moat of data center ownership in the right regions + mediated tool access that works out of the box.