I agree with you, and think we are in the heady days where moat building hasn't quite begun. Regarding 1) and 3), most models have API access to facilitate quick switching and agentic AI middleware reaps the benefits of new models being better at some specific use-case than a competitor. In the not-so-distant future, I can see the walls coming up, with some version of white-listed user-agent access only. At the moment, model improvement hype and priority access are the product, but at some point capability and general access will be the product.

We are already seeing diminishing returns from compute and training costs going up, but as more and more AI is used in the wild and pollutes training data, having validated data becomes the moat.