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How will OpenAI compete?

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#301

Post by Traster »

On the broader point, I think it's right to say that OpenAI has challenges. It simply has no differentiation beyond branding and arguably there are quite a few obvious ways it messed up and lost momentum (the board fight, trying to go in every direction at once etc.)

Today you have a phone in your pocket and you have apps on your home screen. Facebook is on your home screen, Whatsapp or X or Bluesky or whatever have a place on your home screen. Google basically is the safari app on iPhone. I don't know how many people have ChatGPT on their home screen. And soon, there will be some AI in your home screen from Apple (served by Google or another big hitter)that will be an incredible advantage.

That means OpenAI either needs to build up history with users very quickly and use that as stickiness before Apple nukes that distribution. Or they need to find a way of being another device that every living person has in their pocket.

Every attempt at doing that so far has been a comical failure and the way OpenAI are behaving makes me think their attempt will be no different.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#302

Post by seydor »

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…

Google is sticky too, and has a huge moat around that access (android, browsers).

Google hasn't yet pushed hard into dominating the chatGPT use case, but they could EASILY push out chatGPT if they tried. For example, if they instantly turned their search page to the gemini chat, they would instantly have dominated openAI use cases. I'm not saying they would do that, they will probably go for the 'everything app' approach slowly

I think the use cases of chatGPT and google are not differentiated enough to justify 2 winners

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#303

Post by Havoc »

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…

Think a large portion of people won’t take “good enough” if better is available for cheaper.

Datacenters simply scale better than homesevers on cost and performance

So only really works for people that value local highly - which isn’t most people.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#304

Post by ngc248 »

hattmall wrote: post #71
deepfriedbits wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could they have even trained the models 25 years ago? Wikipedia was nothing close to what it is today and I know folks here like to mourn the fall of the open web, but it's still orders of magnitude larger today than it was in 2001. YouTube, so many information stores that simply didn't exist then.

Maybe not 25,but IBM Watson beat humans at Jeopardy over 10 years ago. The technology has been there, the difference is the willingness to burn money on it in hopes of capturing exponential revenue from disrupting industries. Obviously the costs have come down but if IBM felt like burning 100 Billion in 2012 I'm pretty sure they could have a similarly impressive chat bot. Just not sure how they would have ever recoup…

Nah, IBM watson jeopardy version was a one-off. It was an app specifically tuned for that usecase. IBM Watson is not a single product or app. It is more of a marketing term

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#305

Post by ghostcluster »

Traster wrote: post #301

On the broader point, I think it's right to say that OpenAI has challenges. It simply has no differentiation beyond branding and arguably there are quite a few obvious ways it messed up and lost momentum (the board fight, trying to go in every direction at once etc.) Today you have a phone in your pocket and you have apps on your home screen. Facebook is on your home screen, Whatsapp or X or Bluesky or whatever have…

OpenAI has the best cross-thread memory system in ChatGPT amongst all the frontier LLMs and it's not even close.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#306

Post by seydor »

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…

yeah the 'sessions' approach is probably going to be deprecated. one continuous chat is where it's at , perhaps with some bookmarks on the side for easy access

or perhaps a thread-based chat like reddit or HN, where you can branch off an older conversation with yourself

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#307

Post by FartyMcFarter »

mercer wrote: post #277
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.

Hotmail is a good example too. I remember it being pretty ubiquitous, at least for the 'personal email' crowd, and it seemed implausible that people would give up on what was often their main email 'location' for another offering without being able to transfer their often important and personal stuff. then gmail came along.

Interesting point. I guess people liked the convenience of unlimited storage even more than they liked the convenience of keeping the same email address. In a way they traded one convenience for another.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#308

Post by petesergeant »

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 problem with the stickiness is that they will eventually need to start charging, and that friction point will immediately make them come undone. Let’s says they charge $1.99 a month, and Anthropic then step in with a six month free offer, and suddenly everyone has two apps on their phone they’re comfortable with, and it’s a price war over very lightly differentiated products

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#309

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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…

And?

The tech landscape is littered with companies they had users who couldn’t monetize through ads. Beside the costs of serving request via LLMs is orders of magnitude greater than a search result.

On top of that, OpenAI is a sharecropper on other companies’ server, they depend on another company’s search engine and unlike Google, they are dependent on Nvidia.

Don’t forget that most browsing is done on the web and Google is the default search engine on almost every phone sold outside of China.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#310

Post by appplication »

ghostcluster wrote: post #305
Traster wrote: post #301

On the broader point, I think it's right to say that OpenAI has challenges. It simply has no differentiation beyond branding and arguably there are quite a few obvious ways it messed up and lost momentum (the board fight, trying to go in every direction at once etc.) Today you have a phone in your pocket and you have apps on your home screen. Facebook is on your home screen, Whatsapp or X or Bluesky or whatever have…

OpenAI has the best cross-thread memory system in ChatGPT amongst all the frontier LLMs and it's not even close.

Is this a market advantage that is a moat? I don’t see why this wouldn’t be at best a few months lead over the competition. It’s certainly not meaningful to user acquisition.
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