The lead is as strong as ever. They are 34 ELO above anyone else in blind testing, and 73 ELO above in coding [1]. They also seem to have artificially constrain the lead as they already have stronger model like o1 which they haven't released. Consistent to the past, they seem to release just <50 ELO above anyone else, and upgrades the model in weeks when someone gets closer.
[1]: https://lmarena.ai/
The moat as usual is extraordinary scale, resources, time. Nobody is putting $10 billion into the 7th OpenAI clone. Big tech isn't aggressively partnering with the 7th OpenAI clone. The door is already shut to that 7th OpenAI clone (they can never succeed or catch-up), there's just an enormous amount of naivety in tech circles about how things work in the real world: I can just spin up a ChatGPT competitor over the weekend on my 5090, therefore OpenAI have no barriers to entry, etc.
HN used to endlessly talk about how Uber could be cloned in a weekend. It's just people talking about something they don't actually understand. They might understand writing code (or similar) and their bias extends from the premise that their thing is the hard part of the equation (writing the code, building an app, is very far from the hardest part of the equation for an Uber).