How will OpenAI compete? • Hacker News Board

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#261

Post by checker659 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 8:51 AM UTC

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #259

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…

Switching llms is like switching a car. Its a bit annoying in the beginning, it responds slightly different and you need to change you subconscious habits before it feels comfortable. Why everyone always complains about new models. So unless there is a very obvious improvement; most users will prefer to stick to their current llm

That has not been my experience at all. My mom and dad were able to switch from ChatGPT to Gemini without any friction whatsoever. I myself round robin between Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT all the time.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#262

Post by benedictevans » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 8:55 AM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #122

benedictevans wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve missed the point completely - if the important experiences are things built on top of foundation models, where the model itself is just an API call, then you don’t need to have a foundation model for build them and the model is just commodity infra

Yes, but OpenAI has 900M+ user reach, plus staggering amounts of cash, plus early access + deep integration with the latest and greatest models. I hardly think that is tantamount to "just an API call".

Microsoft Google and Meta also had enormous reach, but that didn’t mean that they built everything on the Internet, nor could they.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#263

Post by sreekanth850 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 8:56 AM UTC

Open AI seems to be jack of all trades.i randomly use chatgpt for random questions, never for a serious task. They should check how anthropic is laserfocussed on coding and b2b segment.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#264

Post by operatingthetan » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 8:58 AM UTC

fhd2 wrote: post #187

tikotus wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my experience non-technical folks quite dig the memory feature. For me that's kinda context poisoning as a service, but I know people that get value out of it (or at least strongly feel they do). Not sure how one would migrate that.

OpenAI will send you a download link of all your data in a zip file. You can feed it to Gemini or Claude or whatever.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#265

Post by vkazanov » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 9:02 AM UTC

bg24 wrote: post #254

If Codex 6.0 is better than Opus 4.9, things will flip. While OpenAI has too many common enemies and trying to box them into a consumer company, they are equally enterprise focused. They need to absolutely do well with foundation model - everything else depends on that.

Well, codex is better than opus right now. I have both subscriptions, and use claude for grunt work + codex for reviews. Codex is comparable at code writing but does much better with tools, skills and ad hoc investigations, say, lauching emacs and inspecting internal emacs state on the go.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#266

Post by mvdtnz » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 9:03 AM UTC

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 overestimating stickiness. People spoke endlessly about stickiness of Google for years and years and it took what 18 months for Google search to become virtually irrelevant after LLMs came along?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#267

Post by moomoo11 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 9:11 AM UTC

sreekanth850 wrote: post #263

Open AI seems to be jack of all trades.i randomly use chatgpt for random questions, never for a serious task. They should check how anthropic is laserfocussed on coding and b2b segment.

Codex 5.3 is way better than opus 4.6

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#268

Post by testdelacc1 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 9:12 AM UTC

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…

The difficulty is that “winning” in this case is setting up a monopoly or duopoly and slowly increasing prices. It’s not clear if OpenAI can get so far ahead of the competition that it becomes a two or one horse race. Right now Anthropic and Google are at least as good. And the open source models keep them all honest pricing wise.

OpenAI will likely keep their billion users, and likely monetise them fairly effectively with ads. Their revenue will be considerable. It’s less clear that OpenAI will “win” and their competitors won’t.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#269

Post by stingraycharles » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 9:15 AM UTC

shakow wrote: post #170

oblio wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Isn’t that exactly what’s being discussed re: OpenAI? They seemed unstoppable a few years ago, but have lost quite a bit of reputation and their position of technical lead.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#270

Post by gorgoiler » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 9:17 AM UTC

”In browsers, the last successful product innovations were tabs and merging search with the URL bar.”

I see the point Ben is making even though there are a lot of nerdier innovations he’s skipping over — credential management, APIs (.closest!), evergreen deployments, plugin ecosystems, privacy guards, etc.

One aspect that model execution and web browsers share is resource usage. A Raspberry Pi, for example, makes for a really great little desktop right up until you need to browse a heavy website. In model space there are a lot of really exciting new labs working on using milliwatts to do inference in the field, for the next generation of signal processing. Local execution of large models gets better every day.

The future is in efficiency.