By late 2025, industry consensus and market behavior largely match Chamath’s thesis. Major vendors now describe LLMs as heading toward commodity status, with Microsoft’s AI leadership explicitly warning that as models rapidly converge in capability, they will be quickly commoditized and that the real value for businesses lies in how models are integrated with their own data and workflows. (microsoft.com) Analysts likewise point to steep token-price declines and argue there is little durable moat in the base models themselves, characterizing the space as undergoing rapid commoditization. (linkedin.com)

This is reinforced by the proliferation of strong open- and closed-source foundation models (e.g., Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek) that are either open-weight or easily accessible via APIs, making high-quality general-purpose capabilities widely available rather than exclusive to a single firm. (blog.gordonbuchan.com) Research on Llama 2’s release even treats it as a “commoditization shock” that lowered barriers for downstream developers, consistent with his view that general-purpose models would become baseline infrastructure. (aisel.aisnet.org)

At the same time, business and strategy literature now repeatedly frames proprietary data as the key competitive moat in generative AI—calling it “the new gold,” “the only sustainable enterprise AI moat,” and “the decisive factor” separating winners from laggards. (forbes.com) IBM and California Management Review similarly stress that, because large foundation models are broadly available, advantage comes from customizing them with enterprise-specific data and embedding them in differentiated workflows. (ibm.com) Some executives still argue that frontier models are not yet fully commoditized, but even those perspectives focus on differentiation via systems and domain-specific data rather than the generic base models. (linkedin.com) Overall, the observed direction of the market—models trending toward interchangeable building blocks, with competitive edge shifting to proprietary data—aligns closely with Chamath’s prediction, so it is best judged as right in substance, even if commoditization remains an ongoing process rather than fully complete.