I meant that companies like Anthropic are locking in users with proprietary formats in their harness where it's hard to leave.

Agree. Harness can not be a moat. There are many open harnesses and they are at least on par with the providers ones. It looks like Anthropic/OpenAI's approach to vendor lock-in is not so much the inference or the harness it is functional integration across the individuals and teams in a company. I don't think this will be a moat either, but I think it's all they have outside of compute.

The training data, at least up to now, is very abundant and basically every lab has the same data from scraping the Internet. RLHF data is what's now valuable.

Bubbles aren't always rational.

One possibility is that they're counting on another bailout package like the banks and others got in 2008.

The bets are absolutely huge and have been spread throughout the financial system via securitization. If the number does not continue to go up, a lot of people are going to find themselves backing their numbers with money that simply isn't there anymore. Therefore, the number will continue to go up and we (meaning American taxpayers) will back whatever it takes for that to happen.

Now, were the bets stupid to begin with? Of course. Who wants a machine that potentially unemploys major percentages of the population? No one. But the bets were made regardless, and then more bets were made on the hypothetical returns of the first round of bets, and so on and so on.