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How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

291–300 of 693 posts

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#291

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.

When OpenAI starts requiring a payment, or showing an ad before it starts translating, will they continue? Or will they use the Google Translate app, which can do this locally? (Or for that matter Gemini or Grok or whatever?)

> showing an ad before it starts translating, will they continue

Yes. What evidence do we have that mass consumers decamp because of ads?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#292
post #172
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…

If OSS models are 6-12 months behind, it means sometime during 2026, we'll see a model that is on par with the likes of GPT 5.2/Opus 4.5. For code generation specifically, the performance level of this is going to be more than enough for this customer base. What does Anthropic do then to justify $200/mo price sticker? Better model? Just how much better? Better tools? Single company can't compete with the tools entire…

Just game the benchmarks, bro. (The singularity we didn't want or ask for.)

It's what the current model providers are doing anyways.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#293
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. Vauxhall/Opel has always been my go-to example here. Their cars excel at nothing. They’re not especially stylish. Not the fastest or nicest to drive. Not unusually efficient. Not particularly reliable or guaranteed for a long period. By no means the cheapest. They don’t even achieve a sweet spot of averageness across all these things. Yet people have somehow carried on buying them over decades.

Jeremey Clarkson called the Astra "the most boring car ever made". I loved both of mine - they always got me and my stuff where I needed to be, and were easy to fix.

The last one, a 2007 model that has now moved on to my younger sibling, might be the last "simple" car.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#294

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 disagree. So far I've seen people use "Photoshop" and "Google" as verbs. No one uses "ChatGPT" as a verb. People do use ChatGPT but the brand recognition isn't that strong. My anecdotes are that Google is winning even on consumer side.

As a verb, no, but the product name somehow feels the wrong shape to verb it. I'd say the voice assistants have Google at a disadvantage for similar reasons: "OK Google" is clunky, whereas "Hey Siri," and "Alexa," are not.

But to ChatGPT: when I wander around Berlin, I do overhear people talking about ChatGPT by name.

For all the typical integrated LLM-based "assistants" in other products, I mainly hear people saying things like "I hate it" and "how do I turn this off" and so on, including the one Google has on its search results.

The other pure-play chat-bots that have enough mind-share to even be in the news are Grok (where twitter users seem to like it a lot, even though everyone else up to and including non-US world governments hate it to the point of wanting it banned), Claude (but even then only because of Claude Code), and DeepSeek (because it shows China has no difficulty keeping up with the US). I heard about Mistrial when it was new, but even with the app on my phone I didn't think about it again until about a month ago.

Ask a normal person about Gemini, I'd expect them to think you were talking astrology, not AI.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#295
post #249

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 ever…

Even with inflated RAM prices, you can buy a Strix Halo Mini PC with 128GB unified memory right now for less than 2k. It will run gpt-oss-120b (59 GB) at an acceptable 45+ tokens per second: https://github.com/lhl/strix-halo-testing?tab=readme-ov-file...

I also believe that it should eventually be possible to train a model with somewhat persistent mixture of experts, so you only have to load different experts every few tokens. This will enable streaming experts from NVMe SSDs, so you can run state of the art models at interactive speeds with very little VRAM as long as they fit on your disk.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. So far I've seen people use "Photoshop" and "Google" as verbs. No one uses "ChatGPT" as a verb. People do use ChatGPT but the brand recognition isn't that strong. My anecdotes are that Google is winning even on consumer side.

> No one uses "ChatGPT" as a verb. In my experience, they do, a lot. "I asked ChatGPT" is something I hear a lot. And yes, this example is not using ChatGPT as a verb, but the idea of brand recognition is there; it's just a grammar thing.

> I asked ChatGPT

> use ChatGPT as a verb

Pick one. And yes I think they are worlds apart.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much is your wife paying for the privilege to use OAI presently?

This is the real question. Is she willing to pay $20 per month when Google's Gemini is free? Google can remain irrational longer than OAI can remain solvent.

Me and my gf do. Gemini is an absolute garbage and I’m willing to die on that hill.

- Atrocious mobile application

- Gemini web somehow consumes GIGABYTES of memory doing absolutely NOTHING

- No projects

- UX is terrible (want to remove that a autogenerated diagram at the top? No button for you, fucker, good luck finding the conversation it belongs to)

- No shopping mode

- mobile application loses context mid conversation or when continuing from web/mobile

- model itself is a hot garbage, even the pro variants:

* Switches to Chinese mid sentence on a trivial topic (Python subprocessing)

* Uses Russian propaganda videos as a source

* Completely ignores instructions

* Default prompt is garbage and you constantly have to hand hold it to get proper answers

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#298

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

Imagine subliminal messages being sent in the llm responses carefully created for max impact on you. I’m sure many companies will pay to recommend their product on ChatGPT.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#299
post #249

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 ever…

There will be companies producing ICs for cheap models, like Taalas or Axelera.ai today. These models will not be as good as the SOTA models, but because they are so fast, in a multi-agent approach with internet/database connectivity they can be as good as SOTA models, at least for the general public.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny. What lead? Gemini and Claude are much better.

Yeah. I also do not see the lead. Claude Opus writes better code and for conversation all models even Le Chat is just better than ChatGPT currently.

> for conversation all models even Le Chat is just better than ChatGPT currently

Not sure what you’re smoking, but I want some.

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