A weekend deep dive away from the news cycle. The question underneath this week's "who controls AI" headlines isn't the supplier's question — it's yours: if every company on earth can buy the exact same foundation model you can, where does durable advantage actually come from? Efficiency from "using AI" is real but not durable, because everyone gets it. This episode braids three expert frameworks into one CEO thesis — the model is the commodity; the moat is everything you build around it.

Benedict Evans (independent tech analyst, on Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter): we're in the "1997 phase" of AI — "as big a deal as the internet or mobile, and only as big." When software gets trivially easy to build, distribution becomes the moat, and the right workforce question is "task or job?" not "what percent can AI do?" Dr. Wa ...