How will OpenAI compete? • Hacker News Board

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#131

Post by akie » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 5:41 AM UTC

junipertea wrote: post #111

lelanthran wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. > My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. Is she paying for it? Because as we have seen repeatedly in the past, paid products whither and die when Microsoft bundles a default replacement. You need to provide a really good reason why this time its diff…

I believe specifically for Microsoft, they did bundle a default replacement for chatGPT in a lot of different places (Bing chat, Copilot) which use OpenAI models! But the end product is notably worse than native interface. There is a bare-minimum-level of usability required. For chat apps, good enough is good enough. For something as universally useful and easy to use as ChatGPT, the bar is higher. I don't want to co…

ChatGPT and all the competitors have the exact same UI and UX.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#132

Post by freakynit » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 5:42 AM UTC

hattmall wrote: post #64

kshacker wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done that at my home. My wife calls maids. They are there. I need to go to restroom. Ask my wife. She is struggling to communicate. It took me 3 seconds to realize ChatGPT could help. And it did.

Nice that ChatGPT does that, its also true that Google Translate and other APPs have had this functionality for a decade or more. I was getting live German translated on my phone in 2015 with no problems.

I have been using google lens heavily to scan posters/flyers/information displays in other languages and get it translated to english in like 2-3 seconds. So freakin helpful.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#133

Post by oblio » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 5:45 AM UTC

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #114

shubhamjain wrote: post #29

Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. There are no network effects for sure, but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Understandable tha…

I think you're right about stickyness up to a point. Cultural defaults seem unchangeable but then suddenly everyone knows, that's everyone knows, that OpenAI is passé. OpenAI has a real chance to blow their lead, ending up in a hellish no-man's land by trying to please everyone: Not cool enough for normies, not safe enough for business, not radical enough for techies. Pick a lane or perish. Not owning their own infra…

> Being a first mover doesn't guarantee getting to the golden goose, remember MySpace.

MySpace, ICQ, Altavista, Dropbox, Yahoo, BlackBerry, Xerox Alto, Altair 8800, CP/M, WordStar, VisiCalc, the list is very long.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#134

Post by chii » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 5:47 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #94

chii wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, how is it any worse than 'google'? chatgpt is generic (as in, no prior meaning attached, except for the few people in the world who understand what GPT stands for). It's simple - even a non-english speaker can say it easily, and doesn't require one to be native to know how to pronounce it (this is a difficult concept for a native english speaker to grok). These features makes for a good name.

"Google" at least doesn't have an acronym for "Generative pre-trained transformer" baked into it.

Even you agreed that almost nobody knows what GPT stands for - which means it's as random as any other three letter acronyms.

So i argue that chatGPT is indeed a good name (as good as google was).

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#135

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 5:49 AM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #43

shubhamjain wrote: post #29

Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. There are no network effects for sure, but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Understandable tha…

> Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. I think you're underestimating how fickle consumers are, and how much their choices are based on fashion and emotion. A couple more of these, and OpenAI will find itself relegated to the kids' table with Grok and Perplexity. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/15/1121900/gpt4o-gr...

[deleted]

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#136

Post by energy123 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 5:50 AM UTC

nick32661123 wrote: post #98

energy123 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a joint ignorance of how these frontier models get baked and what consumers want. Many pundits think it's just a matter of scraping the internet and having a few ML scientists run ablation experiments to tune hyperparameters. That hasn't been true for over a year. The current requirements are more org-scale, more payoff from scale, more moat. The main legitimate competitive threat is adversarial distillation. Ma…

You pay to OpenAI or which one do you use? Do you switch regularly?

I pay OpenAI but I would also be a happy Anthropic customer.

My view is that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have a good moat. It's now an oligopolistic market with extreme barriers to entry due to needed scale. The moat will keep growing as the payoffs from scale keep growing. They have internal scale and scope economies as the breadth of synthetic data expands. The small differences between the labs now are the initial conditions that will magnify the differences later.

It wouldn't be surprising to also see consolidation of the industry in the next 2 years which makes it even more difficult to compete, as 2 or 3 winners gobble up everyone and solidify their leads.

When people worry about frontier lab's moat, they point to open weights models, which is really a commentary that these models have zero cost to replicate (like all software). But I think the era of open weights competition cannot be sustained, it's a temporary phenomenon tied to the middle-ground scale we're in where labs can still do that affordably. The absolute end of this will be the end-game of nation state backed competition.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#137

Post by bogdan » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 5:53 AM UTC

DrammBA wrote: post #88

ryanlitalien wrote: post #45

I speak native English and barebones high school Spanish. I recently visited Costa Rica and almost every time there was a language barrier issue (unknown word or phrase), the local folks opened ChatGPT, said what they were trying to say in Spanish and then had ChatGPT convert it to English. It was everywhere.

It's incredible that google translate had this moat for a decade (maybe more) including live translation but people prefer to use chatgpt now

Google translate is nowhere close to as good as AI translate.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#138

Post by nopinsight » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 5:55 AM UTC

danny_codes wrote: post #90

theptip wrote: post #24

I think this take underestimates a couple points: 1) the opportunities for vertical integration are huge. Anthropic originally said they didn’t want to build IDEs, then realized the pivot to Claude Code was available to them. Likewise when one of these companies can gobble up Legal, Medical, etc why would they let companies like Harvey capture the margins? 2) oss models are 6-12 months behind the frontier because of…

The question is always about performance plateau. If LLM performance plateaus, then OSS models will catch up. If there isn’t a plateau, then I can simply ask the super intelligent AI to distill itself, or tell me how to build a clone. It’s ironic, if the promise of AGI were realized, all knowledge companies, including AI companies, become worthless

You are assuming that superintelligent AI will follow every command of users outside the labs.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#139

Post by Gnocchi_ » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 5:55 AM UTC

svnt wrote: post #125

siliconc0w wrote: post #120

I've churned off OAI in favor of maxing out Claude. Better coding model and less creepy engagement hacking in the chat interface.

I get plenty of creepy engagement hacking with claude’s chat too now. Before memory it was better.

You can always turn it off

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#140

Post by readitalready » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 5:56 AM UTC

All they need to do is fund thousands of vibe coders to create apps and utilities for people using their model.

Like, why do I STILL have to do taxes and accounting with external tools? Why doesn't OpenAI have their own tax filing service for the people?

OpenAI should just drop their API service and build everything themselves. It's exactly what they did with ChatGPT. Build thousands of things, not just a few.