Moat becomes adaptation velocity

If Lovable-style 3 month model cycles really become the norm, we’re basically signing up for permanent PMF roulette. Every quarter, the ground shifts. Your “AI feature” stops being a moat and turns into table stakes. @sarahookr’s point that great people increasingly optimize for mission and peers over comp just adds fuel to this. The folks who can actually ship with these new models won’t stick around for a slightly higher salary if the culture is mid and the mission is fuzzy. So durable advantage in AI starts to look a lot less like “we hit SOTA on benchmark X” and a lot more like a control system. You want: - Release velocity that matches or beats the model cadence - Cultural coherence so the company does not emotionally DDoS itself every time OpenAI or Anthropic drops a blog post - Talent density where the top 10 percent of the team can absorb a new foundation model and have it in production before the press cycle is over Miss on any of these and you are basically opting into being re-disrupted every 90 days. In this world, your real moat is how fast your team can re-route, re-ship, and stay sane. The models will keep changing. The loop you build around them is the thing that sticks.