23
May
The deep learning wave of the early 2010s led to a surge of data-hungry products. These products needed so much data that gathering it requires significant investment. So, the business community started honing the idea of data as a strategic asset and a business moat. As the Economist put it in a 2017 issue, “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.” This essay discusses data moats in today’s context of generative AI, which is driven by models that are exponentially more data-hungry. But first, what is a data moat? what is even an “AI product”?A data…