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How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

161–170 of 693 posts

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#161

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…

Pick a lane or perish.

Literally every industry has examples of businesses that don't excel at anything and still do well enough to carry on. In fact, in most industries, it's actually hard to see any business that's clearly leading on any specific front because as soon as it becomes an obvious factor in gaining market share the competing businesses focus on that area as well.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#162
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…

To go vertical they’d need to illustrate the value-add, a problem that the vertical competitors already have. Why use Claude for Accountants at $300/month when regular Claude will do the same thing for much less? The stock answer is that Claude for Accountants keeps your data more secure and doesn’t train on it. But a) I think the enterprise consumer is much less likely to trust a model creator not to stick its hand…

Once the majority of work at a company can be done by AI, Anthropic has an alternative revenue stream to selling AIs to that company--directly competing with that company with a completely integrated AI system. There's of course many barriers to entry/various advantages of incumbents--but it's possible to see a world in which the company selling the AI has a huge advantage too.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#163
post #55

Same question for Atrophic. Personally I only see Google (Gemini), X (Grok) and the Chinese models having a chances to still be alive in 1-2 years.

X has only brand recognition right now, and an extremely toxic one.

Big customers may buy but won't give them logos, people who are offended by Musk's worldview won't pay them either. You don't do well with a toxic brand: just look at Ye having to buy full page apologies ads to try and sell a record.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#165
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

Not if they can leverage their superior abundance of compute/intelligence to invade other industries.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdata point: I canceled my ChatGPT pro subscription last year over some shitty thing Altman did at OpenAI and easily moved over to Claude. The only thing I took with me was the system prompt or whatever it's called, I couldn't care less about my conversation history. I'm planning to do the same thing with my Claude subscription if Anthropic kowtows to the Pentagon. These services are not sticky at all IMO.

Where are you thinking of moving to?

I have been positively surprised with Mistral which I have been trying out.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#167

Well there's the whole race to ASI thing. Whoever gets there first, the world is theirs. The thing will learn how learn, an intelligence feedback loop, make its own apps, find more efficient algorithms, deploy itself to more locations, bankrupt all competitors, embed itself in everyone's lives, and create a complete monopoly for the parent company that can never be touched. Until it goes rogue anyway. (Aside, it's in…

Seems like anthropic is the only company that really believes in AGI still, considering their neglect of the consumer market and continued worries about AI ethics

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#168
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What percentage of Meta's users are paying? Google's? The advertiser based business model for those companies makes your question/thought process here problematic for me. Historically speaking Google and "Meta" (Facebook) were primarily advertising provider companies. They provided billboards (space and time on the web page in front of an end-user) to people who were willing to buy tht space and time on the billboa…

Yes -- but both Google and Meta didn't start off as an advertising company - they started off providing a service a lot of people liked, and then eventually added ads to it. My assumption (somewhat implicit, admittedly) is that there's no reason OpenAI couldn't do the same. I can understand why that might be controversial, though. But honestly, if OpenAI can't figure out ads given all their data and ability, they des…

I agree that OpenAI could and most likely will execute quite well on ads.

What I'm uncertain about is how much the ability of Google to set defaults matters.

Setting Gemini as the "AI" on phones, automatically integrated with all "daily" services could matter a lot. They have a platform ready to go and are pushing hard to make themselves really attractive. All while being very profitable.

Apple on the other hand will be in a strong position to negotiate a good deal with competitors to OAI and my suspicion is that "good enough AI" is all most people need.

And of course there is the financial reality that OpenAI does not only need profits, but profits on an enormous scale. Just being successful would mean they missed the mark.

My personal guess is that Microsoft will fully buy them at some point in the future but I'm not, confidence enough to bet any money on it.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#169
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did verify the output. You can download your stuff via their api

Ok so it worked correctly today, for you. How do we know it will continue to do so five years down the road when they are suffocating for cash? The more stuff we have there, the harder it becomes to verify their takeout will have everything.

I think it depends on the task.

How bad it is if put of 200+ conversations, a couple of those are not exported correctly? Not much honestly. If I verify some of those and they are ok, I would see no reason to keep verifying all of them.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#170
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VisiCalc, CP/M, BlackBerry and Yahoo definitely got a golden goose; it's long after establishing their dominance that they failed at maintaining it.
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