It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it • Hacker News Board

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#31

Post by sergiotapia » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:13 PM UTC

OpenAI doesn't have a moat unfortunately. One URL replacement away and you can switch most models in minutes. I have personally done this many times over the last year and a half.

It only takes labs to produce better and better models, and the race to bottom on token costs.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#32

Post by nemomarx » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:13 PM UTC

hn_throw_bs wrote: post #25

Can someone elucidate us as to how so many platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc etc) all sprung up so quickly? How did the engineering teams immediately know how to go about doing this kind of tech with LLMs and DNNs and whatnot?

Was it that quickly? GPT 3 is where I would kind of put the start of this and that was in 2020, they had to work on the technology for quite a while before it got like this. Everyone else has been able to follow their progress and see what works.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#33

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #6

FfejL wrote: post #2

"[Microsoft's] platform power didn’t just come from controlling applications on top of Windows, but the OEM ecosystem underneath. If OpenAI builds AI for everyone, then they are positioned to extract margin from companies up-and-down the stack — even Nvidia. " Ah yes, the ChromeOS strategy. How'd that work out for Google? Building a platform is good, a way to make quite a bit of money. It's worked really well for Goo…

It worked great, Web is ChromeOS Platform for all practical purposes, with Firefox meagre 3%, and Safari only being relevant thanks to iOS, and the whole Electron crap as "native apps".

[deleted]

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#34

Post by warkdarrior » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

hn_throw_bs wrote: post #25

Can someone elucidate us as to how so many platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc etc) all sprung up so quickly? How did the engineering teams immediately know how to go about doing this kind of tech with LLMs and DNNs and whatnot?

"so quickly" meaning over the last 3 years? (ChatGPT was launched in Nov 2022)

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#35

Post by pixl97 » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #14

tallowen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a different takeaway - that a lot of folks on here read Ben Thomson and respect his work! It sounds like Ben is pretty bullish on OpenAI and maybe he's convinced folks through his work to agree with this take.

I don't even know who "Ben" is...

Anecdotes are only a datapoint and nearly meaningless by themselves. For a great many others just the stratechery.com website alone is enough to get a view and an upvote.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#36

Post by mallowdram » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

That's a precise, incisive observation: OpenAI is trivial (any AI provider is), supported by evidence as demonstrated. It has no claim to operating software that's specifically distinct from others.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#37

Post by chmod775 » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:15 PM UTC

barrenko wrote: post #18

kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

You could say the same thing about Facebook...

You mean the social network that is currently dying the same death as countless other platforms before it, just on a larger scale?

Maybe some are too young to remember the great migrations from/to MySpace, MSN, ICQ, AIM, Skype, local alternatives like StudiVZ, ..., where people used to keep in contact with friends. Facebook was just the latest and largest platform where people kept in touch and expressed themselves in some way. People adding each other on Facebook before others to keep in touch hasn't been a thing for 5 years. It's Instagram, Discord, and WhatsApp nowadays depending on your social circle (two of which Meta wisely bought because they saw the writing on the wall).

If I open Facebook nowadays, then out of ~130 people I used to keep in touch with through that platform, pretty much nobody is still doing anything on there. The only sign of life will be some people showing as online because they've the facebook app installed to use direct messaging.

No, people easily migrate between these platforms. All it takes is put your new handles (discord ID/phone number/etc) as a sticky so people know where to find you. And especially children will always use whichever platform their parents don't.

Small caveat: This is a German perspective. I don't doubt there's some countries where Facebook is still doing well.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#38

Post by zkmon » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:16 PM UTC

I think platform monopolies are a thing of the past, where, when most of the world was asleep, a few silicon valley garage companies took over the green field and locked-in a huge customer base irreversibly, thus colonizing the world. The world is now much more awake and connected, ruling out any concentration of dominance. You can't have a repeat of colonial times.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#39

Post by icyfox » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:17 PM UTC

hn_throw_bs wrote: post #25

Can someone elucidate us as to how so many platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc etc) all sprung up so quickly? How did the engineering teams immediately know how to go about doing this kind of tech with LLMs and DNNs and whatnot?

All of the products you mention already had research teams (in the case of ChatGPT and Claude that actually predated most of their engineers). So knowing how to build small language models was always in their wheel house. Scaling up to larger LLMs required a few algorithmic advancements but for the most part it was a question of sourcing more data and more compute. The remarkable part of transformers is their scaling laws, which let us achieve much better models without having to reinvent new architecture.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#40

Post by yalogin » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:17 PM UTC

I am not sure about this. They definitely created a brand new service and data flows that didn’t exist before and they have the majority of the mind share, however it’s already commoditized. The next two to three years will show how the chips fall. I can see that it’s tough or almost impossible for apple to get a share in this but google is right there to take the consumer side. For enterprise again we have to wait and see how gcp and AWS do.

The value is not in the llm but vertical integration and providing value. OpenAI has identified this and is doing is vertical integration in a hurry. If the revenue sustains it will be because of that. For consumer space again, nvidia is better positioned with their chips and SoCs but OpenAI is not a sure thing yet. By that I don’t mean they are going to fall apart, they will continue to make a large amount fmloney but whether it’s their world or not is still up in the air.