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How will OpenAI compete?

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#241

Post by enos_feedler »

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…

Completely disagree with this take. I was an early free OpenAI user and switched to Gemini once it got good enough and bundled a bunch of services together to make the paid product free. OpenAI will need distribution to maintain any kind of durable market share. They need to become a bundler of other subs, or else they will just be the next Disney+ or Spotify that needs telecoms (Hah!) to push their paid product onto user's phone bills.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#242

Post by piva00 »

kristianc wrote: post #182
protocolture wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. People used to suggest this about MySpace.

MySpace never had close to a billion users.

300 million users in 2007 is mighty impressive, the internet was not absolutely ubiquitous like now, mobile access to it was in its infancy. Relatively speaking it is as impressive as 1 billion users in 2026.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#244

Post by medi8r »

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…

We are in the Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos etc. stage. Plenty of room for a Google still.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#245

Post by minraws »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #228
sigmoid10 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 retri…

Maybe I am underestimating how suggestible average people are as someone who has never in their lives clicked on an ad I just can't see ads being anything but a deterrent for using the service

Ads aren't just for click through, they are for suggestions, and mind share as well.

You can't click on the budweiser logo when watching super bowl ad. But if you sit in your chatgpt window all day then it's probably worth it for advertisers to expect to build familiarity with brands they advertise.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#246

Post by hereonout2 »

tikotus wrote: post #180
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 hear the claim that people already have their conversation on ChatGPT and can't move them. I'm curious, what are these discussions like? I've never continued an old discussion, I just start a new one every time I have a question. If the discussion is long, I often start a new chat to get a blank slate. My experience is that the chat history just causes confusion. So I'm curious to understand: What are the discussio…

I'm curious from the other direction, what are the conversations like if you feel they are easy to move?

Do you have the memory feature disabled? I have the feeling this in particular is doing absolutely loads behind the scene, e.g summarising all conversations and adding additional hidden context to every request.

I can start a new chat in the UI right now, ask it what my job is, what my current project is, how many kids I have, what car I drive etc. It'll know the answer already.

I think it's this conversation history - or maybe better yet if we think of it as this "relationship" - that people are saying is going to make it hard to move.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#247

Post by anonyfox »

pllbnk wrote: post #179
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…

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…

> ChatGPT has a good name

I don't know but around here common people all say "Chatty" nowadays, and also most people if writing the correct name fail to spell "gpt" right quite often in chat.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#248

Post by smiley1437 »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #228
sigmoid10 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 retri…

Maybe I am underestimating how suggestible average people are as someone who has never in their lives clicked on an ad I just can't see ads being anything but a deterrent for using the service

I agree with you, I can't stand ads

However, I believe an ad it still influences you subconsciously as long as it is in your sight line.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a lot of investigation into subtly slipping advertising in the LLM responses the way Korean dramas have product placement right in the storyline (Subway, bbq chicken, beverages, makeup, etc).

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#249

Post by sdrinf »

daxfohl wrote: post #130

I just wonder how long it'll take local models to be good enough for 99% of use cases. It seems like it has to happen sooner or later. My hunch is that in five years we'll look back and see current OpenAI as something like a 1970's VAX system. Once PCs could do most of what they could, nobody wanted a VAX anymore. I have a hard time imagining that all the big players today will survive that shift. (And if that partic…

Taking the opposite side of that bet, here is why:

* even if an openweight model appears on huggingface today, exceeding SOTA, given my extensive experience with a wide variety of model sizes, I would find it highly surprising the "99% of use cases" could be expressed in * Meanwhile: I pulled claude to look into consumer GPU VRAM growth rates, median consumer VRAM went 1-2GB @ 2015 to ~8GB @ 2026, rougly doubles every 5 years; top-end isn't much better, just ahead 2 cycles.

* Putting aside current ram sourcing issues, it seems very unlikely even high-end prosumers will routinely have >100GB VRAM (=ability to run quantized SOTA 100b model) before ~2035-2040.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#250

Post by 3836293648 »

lelanthran wrote: post #129
junipertea wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But the end product is notably worse than native interface. That was my point - a lot of superior products were eaten by poor bundled replacements. Last I checked, copilot has more users than ChatGPT simply because users are using it from within Excel, Word, Outlook and Teams, without even knowing that they are using copilot. It's bundled into Windows. Right now, copilot is more useful to users than ChatGPT because…

Copilot doesn't have users. They're rebranding their non-llm offerings as copilot to make it not look like a failure
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