Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

I've twice spent a couple of hours unsuccessfully trying to generate a simple background image that would be blurred out when rendering 3D models. SD out-of-the-box was far worse, but Midjourney still was not up to the task. It's incredible how well they can generate images of nearly any subject/object and make some changes to the style and placement, but trying to precisely achieve critical broad-stroke things like like perspective, sizing, lighting direction/amount/temperature, etc. was far too cumbersome. Prompt refining is just like having a program with a bunch of nebulous undocumented menu entries that you just have to click on to see what they do rather than just giving you the tools to make what you need to make. Was that the right entry or the wrong entry? Who knows! Maybe just try it again to see if it works better!

There's a fundamental disconnect between professional-level and consumer-level tools. Consumer tools must be approachable, easy to use, quickly yield appealing results, affordable, and require little maintenance. Professional tools need to be precise, reliable, capable of repeated results with the most demanding tasks, and easily serviceable into perfect working order.

These are consumer-level tools. If you merely need a cool picture of a space ship done in such and such style with such and such guns blah blah blah (that for some reason always looks 10%-50% Thomas Kinkaid,) these tools are great, but they abstract away the controls that really matter in professional work. Novices who get overwhelmed by all of those factors love it because they don't understand, and probably don't care about what they're giving up. For serious work, aside from getting inspo images or maybe generating deliberately weird bits of whatever, they're hit-or-miss at best. Without exception, doing a rough mock-up in a modelling program took FAR less time than trying to wrangle exactly what I needed from one of those generators.

I'm sure they'll get there someday but right now they're miles away from being professional-quality image generation tools.

Like original search, the two application aspects are roughly algorithm and interface. Google years ago won by having a better interface, an interface that usually got things right the first time (good defaults are a key aspect of any successful UI). ChatGPT is has gotten excitement by taking a LLM and making it generally avoid idiocy - again, fine-tuning the interface. Google years ago and ChatGPT got their better results by human labor, human fine tuning, of a raw algorithm (In ChatGPT's case, you have RLHF with workers in Kenya and elsewhere, Google has human search testers and years ago used DMOZ, an open source, human curated portal).

Google's "Moat" years ago was continuing to care about quality. They lost this moat over the last five years imo by letting their search go to shit, become focused always on some product for any given search. This is what has made ChatGPT especially challenging for Google (it would be amazing still but someone comparing to Google ten years ago could see ways Google was better, present day Google has little over ChatGPT as UI. If Google had kept their query features as they added AI features, they'd have a tool that could claim virtues through still not as good).

And this isn't even considering of updating a model and the question of how the model will be monetized.