L1A Public & Open Data
Common Crawl, Wikipedia, arXiv, GitHub, open government data.
L1A Public & Open Data is a sublayer of L1 Data in the Supply Chain of Intelligence™ (SCOI) by Anand Arivukkarasu. It is a required capability but not on its own a durable moat. Use public data as your baseline, but never as your differentiator. If a customer can ask ChatGPT the same question and get the same answer, you have no L1 story.
What actually matters at L1A
- Public web data is now legally contested; assume future access shrinks, not grows.
- Every competitor has it too — public data by itself is not a moat.
- Data cleaning and deduping is a real capability, not a commodity.
The startup lens
Use public data as your baseline, but never as your differentiator. If a customer can ask ChatGPT the same question and get the same answer, you have no L1 story.
Vertical lens — how this plays across categories
Case law is public — the moat is the graph on top, not the corpus.
GitHub public repos are table stakes; private repo access via GitHub App is the wedge.
Combine open + licensed archives — licenses become the durable half.
How to defend L1A
- Better curation and deduping than the crowd.
- License-clean training corpora as a saleable asset.