Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also have the leading model.
In which area?
I'd assume active user count
It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
61–70 of 284 posts
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#62OpenAI doesn't have a moat unfortunately. One URL replacement away and you can switch most models in minutes. I have personally done this many times over the last year and a half. It only takes labs to produce better and better models, and the race to bottom on token costs.
you could say the same thing about a search engine. if they keep an edge on brand or quality they can find ways of monetizing that attention
Honestly how google maintains a "moat" over other search engines could use a good business study. They've defied some pretty serious competitors there without an obvious lock in or anything.
(You can say default in various browsers and a phone OS and that's probably the main component but it's not clear changing that default would let Bing win or etc.)
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#63The current AI wave has been compared (by sama) to electricity and sometimes transistors. AI is just going to be in all the products. The trillion dollar question is: Do you care what kind of electricity you are using? So, will you care what kind of AI you are using.
In the last few interviews with him I have listened to he has said that what he wants is "your ai" that knows you, everywhere that you are. So his game is "Switching Costs" based on your own data. So he's making a device, etc etc.
Switching costs are a terrific moat in many circumstances and requires a 10x product (or whatever) to get you to cross over. Claude Code was easily a 5x product for me, but I do think GPT5 is doing a better job on just "remembering personal details" and it's compelling.
I do not think that apps inside chatgpt matters to me at all and I think it will go the way of all the other "super app" ambitions openai has.
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
they understand that, and that's why they're making it sticky by adding in app purchasing, advertising, integrations. also why they hired OGs from IG/FB. They are building the moat and hoping that first to market is going to work out.
I do not believe that advertising and purchasing is at the top of the list of things what make software sticky
they are trying to become/replace google. they are first to market for an entirely new query paradigm and in app purchases and advertising are just one aspect of a platform.
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#65Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#66I'm on the verge of unsubscribing from Stratechery. The last month has been a bunch of fawning over Meta, YouTube, and constant talk about and fawning over OpenAI and whatever latest models are coming out. It's kind of tiring and boring. I swear I heard them talk about some YouTube influencers event like five times across their different shows and across time. Like, I do not care at all.
Did you listen to the recent interview with Ben Bajarin? I thought that interview alone justified the subscription. Curious as to whether anyone else felt the same.
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#67"[Microsoft's] platform power didn’t just come from controlling applications on top of Windows, but the OEM ecosystem underneath. If OpenAI builds AI for everyone, then they are positioned to extract margin from companies up-and-down the stack — even Nvidia. " Ah yes, the ChromeOS strategy. How'd that work out for Google? Building a platform is good, a way to make quite a bit of money. It's worked really well for Goo…
It worked great, Web is ChromeOS Platform for all practical purposes, with Firefox meagre 3%, and Safari only being relevant thanks to iOS, and the whole Electron crap as "native apps".
I don't think that this is true in terms of being able to extract profits from the OEMs underneath, which is what the parent commenter quoted from the article. I don't think this refutes their response as much as it's a different point than the one they were responding to.
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#68"[Microsoft's] platform power didn’t just come from controlling applications on top of Windows, but the OEM ecosystem underneath. If OpenAI builds AI for everyone, then they are positioned to extract margin from companies up-and-down the stack — even Nvidia. " Ah yes, the ChromeOS strategy. How'd that work out for Google? Building a platform is good, a way to make quite a bit of money. It's worked really well for Goo…
> Ah yes, the ChromeOS strategy. How'd that work out for Google? They dominate the EDU market?
If OpenAI is only able to dominate a market the size of this, I don't think it's their world that we're all living in
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#69Can someone elucidate us as to how so many platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc etc) all sprung up so quickly? How did the engineering teams immediately know how to go about doing this kind of tech with LLMs and DNNs and whatnot?
Was it that quickly? GPT 3 is where I would kind of put the start of this and that was in 2020, they had to work on the technology for quite a while before it got like this. Everyone else has been able to follow their progress and see what works.
GPT 2 didn't have a chat interface but had made a splash in some circles (think spam-adjacent).
Edit: mixed up my dates claiming DALL E came out before GPT 3
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#70Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…
Yeah, I'm extremely loyal to ChatGPT Plus and Codex, but is't because OpenAI has a native Mac app that I like, and Codex included with Plus and has served me well enough to not look at Claude. I like GPT-5 quite a bit as a user. I'll concede none of these are small things - they've had my money for 2+ years - but they're not gigantic advantages either.
At an enterprise level however, in the current workload I am dealing with, I can't get GPT-5 with high thinking to yield acceptable results; Gemini 2.5 Pro is crushing it in my tests.
Things are changing fast, and OpenAI seems to be the most dynamic player in terms of productization, but I'm still failing to see the moat.