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# Your non-AI moat
- URL: https://www.taivo.ai/__your-non-ai-moat/
- Published: 2023-03-15T14:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2024-01-23T12:42:41.000Z
- Author: Taivo Pungas
- Tags: Companies, stream

"What's the **Moat* of your AI company?" That seems to be top of mind for founders pitching their novel idea to VCs -- and the most common question they get.

But I think it might not be the right question. Right now, nobody seems to have a good answer. a16z [doesn't](https://a16z.com/2023/01/19/who-owns-the-generative-ai-platform/?ref=taivo.ai). At the same time, the pace of new builders piling into AI is dizzying. What if the answer is that AI tech is the wrong place to look for a moat?

Like, if you claim that Javascript makes your company defensible, you had better have an exotic and convincing argument for that. Most likely it doesn't; it's commodity tech. Similarly, the advantage of prompt engineering, or fine-tuning, or custom models, or datasets, as a moat is precarious: **GPT*\-4 or 5 might just render all of this unnecessary, because users can just zero-shot whatever your whole application does, directly in **ChatGPT*.

Perhaps the right question is instead: knowing you're an AI company, where can you *create* something uniquely defensible, leveraging the fact that it is still early days? If you go through a list of the **7 Powers (Hamilton Helmer)*, then which of these do you have the most realistic chance of achieving, fast?

So: where's your non-AI related moat?