Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 693 posts

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#211

Post by rossant »

chii wrote: post #83
simonw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think it's hilarious that a product name as awful as "ChatGPT" has become so ubiquitous. I wonder what percentage of its users know what the GPT stands for, or even thought about it for a second?

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.

It's very weird to pronounce it as a French. Either you pronounce it like in English with a thick French accent like "tchat' djee-pee-tee" or like in French as "tchat' jay-pey-tey" which sounds exactly like "I farted". This is really a terrible name in French.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#212

Post by Morromist »

scrollop wrote: post #199
pllbnk wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT has a good name. It's weird and awkward but it still rolls off the tongue. And I am saying that as a non native English speaker because the name has been migrated to other languages with the English pronunciation. In comparison, Claude's name is very bad, it just doesn't sound right and people might mishear me when I say it. I never say "Claude" when talking to other, especially non-technical people, and inst…

Claude may seem incongruous compared to the others, however it's the only human sounding name, compared to the robotic "chatgpt" or others that sound generic or bland company names (Gemini, perplexity). They intentionally chose a more bland sounding name, as, I assume, they wanted to emphasise the "safe" nature compared to their competitors. As more information comes out about openai, people may choose to move to for…

OpenAI has demonstrated a severe lack of ethics, you're right, it's just hard to know how educated the average consumer is about that. The anthropic-military thing is a big deal but I suspect few outside of the tech world really understand the implications of what's going on.

Anectode: My aunt was talking about how she had a conversation with ChatGPT about how bad OpenAI was and the AI said "we need regulations", and that seemed to satisfy her somehow.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#213

Post by candu »

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…

> but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere.

Except these aren't conversations in the traditional sense. Yes, there's the history of prompts and responses exchanged. But the threads don't build on each other - there's no cross-conversational memory, such as you'd have in a human relationship. Even within a conversation it's mostly stateless, sending the full context history each time as input.

So there's no real data or network effect moat - the moat is all in model quality (which is an extremely competitive race) and harness quality (same). I just don't think there's any real switching cost here.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#214

Post by johnsmith1840 »

daxfohl wrote: post #154

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…

Because it's a fantasy for an unknown amount of time. 1 year? 10? 50? Never? There hasn't been a single proper breakthrough in continual learning that would enable it. Anyone that studies CL will also get super pissed at it the problem and solution counteract each other to our current understanding but a fruit fly does it no problem!

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#215

Post by rhubarbtree »

daxfohl wrote: post #154

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…

Why will it do all these things?

Many people say we’re at AGI already and I’m wondering why everyone hasn’t died yet.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#216

Post by jpalomaki »

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…

A good solution for memory would help with stickiness. But it's a hard thing to crack.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#217

Post by KronisLV »

scrollop wrote: post #199
pllbnk wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT has a good name. It's weird and awkward but it still rolls off the tongue. And I am saying that as a non native English speaker because the name has been migrated to other languages with the English pronunciation. In comparison, Claude's name is very bad, it just doesn't sound right and people might mishear me when I say it. I never say "Claude" when talking to other, especially non-technical people, and inst…

Claude may seem incongruous compared to the others, however it's the only human sounding name, compared to the robotic "chatgpt" or others that sound generic or bland company names (Gemini, perplexity). They intentionally chose a more bland sounding name, as, I assume, they wanted to emphasise the "safe" nature compared to their competitors. As more information comes out about openai, people may choose to move to for…

> Openai getting closer to the US military whilst anthropic standing their ground and rejecting them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145963

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145551

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#218

Post by nextlevelwizard »

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…

Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end.

For myself, I use LLMs daily and I would even say a lot on some days and I _did_ pay the 20€/mo subscription for ChatGPT, but with the latest model I cannot justify that anymore.

4o was amazingly good even if it had some parasocial issues with some people, it actually did what I expect an LLM to do. Now the quality of the 5.whatever has gone drastically down. It no longer searches web for things it doesn't know, but instead guesses.

Even worse is the tone it uses; "Let's look at this calmly" and other repeated sentences are just off putting and make the conversation feel like the LLM thinks I am about to kill myself constantly and that is not what I want from my LLM.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#219

Post by sigmoid10 »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #218
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…

Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end. For myself, I use LLMs daily and I would even say a lot on some days and I _did_ pay the 20€/mo subscription for ChatGPT, but with the latest model I cannot justify that anymore. 4o was amazingly good even if it had some parasocial issues with some people, it actually did what I expect an LLM to do. Now the quality of the 5.whatever has gone dra…

>Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end.

Don't underestimate advertising. Noone pays for Facebook or Google search. Yet the ad business with a couple billion users seems profitable enough to fund frontier LLM research and inference infrastructure as a side-gig in these companies. Google only rushed out AI overview because they saw ChatGPT eating their market share in information retrieval and Zuck is literally panicking about the fact that users share more personal details with OpenAI than on his doomscrolling attention sinks.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#220

Post by [deleted] »

shinycode wrote: post #206
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 don’t know how much of an anecdote it is, but all the non-tech people with whom I talk about IA only know chatGPT. Competition is either non existent or the same thing. Among those, no one wants to pay the service, they just stop using it when limits are reached. I can’t say which users can turn the market around but chatGPT is indeed burned in the mind of many and because they don’t care about tech and are not int…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN