https://reedbender.com/tags/ai/Recent content in Ai on Reed BenderHugoen-usWed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://reedbender.com/writing/data-is-the-moat/Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://reedbender.com/writing/data-is-the-moat/<p>The AI discourse right now is fixated on two things: model improvements and agent frameworks. Which model is best. Which orchestration layer is cleanest. How many tools can you wire into a loop. How many agents can you run in parallel? Every week my X feed is filled with a new harness, a new benchmark, a new claim about reasoning.</p> <p>None of it matters as much as the data.</p> <p>The models are converging. A <a href="https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither">leaked Google memo</a> called it in 2023: &ldquo;We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI.&rdquo; Since then, <a href="https://huggingface.co/Qwen">Qwen</a>, <a href="https://www.deepseek.com/">DeepSeek</a>, and Llama have all closed the gap. James Betker at OpenAI <a href="https://nonint.com/2023/06/10/the-it-in-ai-models-is-the-dataset/">said it best</a>:</p>