This concern should be dealt with before leaking IP into the hands of the model owners.

It is a reasonable expectation that those owners will apply the same attitude to IP rights of the users of thd models that they have demonstrated during the training of those same models... that is to say, the willing disregard of anyone's IP in pursuit of their own enrichment.

It would seem that responsible protection of internal IP requires using hardware you own or at least fully control from the bare metal layer up, running models trained or distilled from public datasets which have been rigorously protective of privage IP rights.

or we can just all give up on the idea of knowledge and intellectual concepts as having any inherent limitability... our ideas are not 'the moat'.

The manner in which we engage with our customers will be the real moat. If anyone can recreate our software by asking the model to do the work, what is left for any business to differentiate from those copies becomes the ability to maintain a community of users/customers/participants.

perfectly safe /s

so, not first generation... that reads as NO to the question.

Code was never the scarce resource. Your neighbors' nephew could code a working website that would service the corner shops needs since ten years ago.

The value is and always will be the support and community behind the code.

HN isn't valuable because of a code repo, but because of the community of users and a steady hand cultivating the continued participation thereof. But this too has no real moat, something could change the zeitgeist and tomorrow it joins friendster and TheGlobe.com

Adding another globally common and less regulated substance to the list of extrajudicial desireables simply equals a performance bonus and being low aquisition risk (already shipping other goods from places that grow tobacco and make cigs) as an incentive for the already very profitable and active operators of these networks.

From my perspective this would simply make being a smuggler easier and more profitable and be a value uplift for corrupt enforcement and a net reduction in collectable taxes... moving the revenue from comsumption tax books to black market coffers.

It sounds like the CTO should have been hired as a tech trainer for the existing CTO == you.

I see it again and again in early enterprise. When a dreamholder feels underpowered at the real task of delivering product, thdy build layers of admin to lower the product delivery team, burn through CapEx and OpEx and label that 'growth' and eventually the % promise is worthless.

Production teams beware of founders who just need a dev and not a team of partners. Ego > Ability & Manipulation skill instead of leadership capability.

What you are experiencing is called bait and switch... we should all be building on site models.