Wrote a piece this weekend - "The New Moat: Memory"

Memory challenges the frequently repeated Silicon Valley belief that AI lacks defensibility. 

Spend five minutes at a Bay Area investor dinner and you'll hear that take. That was lazy thinking.

Wrote a piece this weekend - "The New Moat: Memory"

Memory challenges the frequently repeated Silicon Valley belief that AI lacks defensibility. 

Spend five minutes at a Bay Area investor dinner and you'll hear that take. That was lazy thinking.

https://open.substack.com/pub/jeffmorrisjr/p/the-new-moat-memory

It feels like the moat for apps like Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude etc. will be personalization based on user data

The apps already know who the user is, that's why ChatGPT can try to draw a picture of the user (admittedly, they are not good at it yet)

Soon, responses will be tailored to what that particular user wants instead of generic responses (my GPT already remembers that I started skiing this year ⛷️)

This feels similar to Apple Music, Spotify, etc. where the underlying content is commoditized (all apps have access to pretty much the same music library); similarly Claude, ChatGPT's vanilla models will converge and feel largely similar and the main differentiation will be how well they know the end user

Similar to how it's hard to switch from Spotify to Apple Music because music discovery changes (I've tried multiple times and failed), people will find it hard to switch from one agent app to another because they won't want to take on the burden of teaching it again from scratch

New round

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Memory isnt unique to ai apps though right? Does this mean that Google is best positioned, given they have every email you’ve ever written and a bunch of other data on androids?

Took me a little to wrap my head around sentence two, still don't think I  get it. Intuitively, memory feels like a corner stone of AI considering we're trying to recreate the pinnacle of the "center of the universe" us. Also likely won't be surprised when we go from memory to "creativity" through education pipelines. 

And thanks for sharing the "SF Dinner alpha" many of us don't so easily afford to think lazily in those ways.

Love this take. Memory isn’t just a moat it’s the foundation for context, trust, and long-term utility in AI. Funny how people mistake fast demos for defensibility. The real game is compounding experience

One thing that concerns me is that incentives will lead to suboptimal productivity for users. 

Retention is solved through memory. Everyone loves their AI. 

Then how will the org behind the AI maximizes revenue? 

If it charges based on volume for B2B, it will be incentivized to produce lots of calls, processes, etc regardless of results - like bureaucracy bloat. 

And if earns affiliate commissions in B2C, it will be the perfect salesperson to sell you everything, all the time. Knowing your deepest pains that can’t be solved through consuming more. And it will encourage you to share more (to sell you more).