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How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

331–340 of 693 posts

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#331

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…

The trend with email, websites and so on has been to use some large cloud service rather than self host as it's easier. My bet is AI will be similar.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#332
post #276

> The one place where OpenAI does have a clear lead today is in the user base: it has 8-900m users. There is no way that number is an accurate reflection of the number of actual human users of their service. I could believe they have 8-900m bot/fraud accounts in their databases, maybe, but not real users.

I suspect I am one of those 1bn users by their metric. I have an account, and I sometimes query it. I also query Claude and Gemini. I have zero loyalty, if I run out of tokens on one, I will just pick up the conversation on another provider. Perhaps I am using them wrong, but the amount of babysitting I have to do anyway, I don't find it that tedious to stay on the same topic during a swap.

There's no way I would spend $200 a month on any of them, not even $20 considering how few 'tokens' you get. I can see how these tools would be useful to my workflow, but I cannot use them as they are priced 100x too high for me to be reliable.

I have a feeling that would be true for the vast majority of these AI tool users. I really am not sure how these companies are supposed to become profitable. But SV is a bit insane that way.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#333

OpenAI lost the race to nerds' hearts. In the latest benchmarks, OpenAI is simultaneously cheaper (like 50% less?) and scores hire in coding and tool use benchmarks (GPT-5.3-Codex trounces Opus 4.6), yet all the coders want to marry Anthropic. I don't think OpenAI understands how to sell, if they even had a product to sell.

I'm not so sure about that. There's a lot of people that were turned off by Anthropic, especially with the weekly usage limits. that in comparison to Codex is on the last side. And actually Codex is one of the few products that I think OpenAI has executed really well on. there's just no real equivalent in terms of actual usage that you can get for the same amount of money. Gemini is great, but it seems to be still in…

What I also observe is Anthoropic pissed a lot of people off when they removed external tool usage from the subscription. OpenAI won some points and usage in codex. But what conclusions can you really draw from a few reddit posts...

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#334

I have only dabbled with Claude and other AI tools, but from what I can tell, only ChatGPT has folders and a robust organization system. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong here.) This matters a lot to me, as I use AI as something of an ongoing project organizer, and not purely for specific prompts. So at least for me, it would be a huge hassle to move to another platform, on par with moving from one note-taking softwar…

Check Claude Projects. Also Claude Code. Both have "folders".

Ah I see. I didn’t notice these before. Thanks!

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#335

As far as I can tell Google Gemini has the best overall integrations (Android, WearOS, Google Home) with the only voice recognition that actually works (Gemini Live). Anthropic Claude has the best integrations with coding; what would make sense is for them to focus on that segment. Other AI companies don't have anything really compelling. Meta has a model that's fully open-source, but then that's not particularly use…

The tide seems to be shifting on codex, but also lets not forget openai has a brand that none of the others have - it's _the_ AI. Sure Google can go against that, but it's openai is definitely in a much better spot. It's pretty important for a consumer market.

This thing about openai brand is changing fast. In the dev circles I'm part of, everybody dislikes OpenAI and prefer Claude. How long it'll take for the same to happen with the normies?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#336
post #179

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…

Absolutely no enduser knows what 'GPT' stands for and if you tell them it's Generative Pre-trained Transformer they're even more confused than before.

There's better brand names out there.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whoever gets there first, the world is theirs. Yes, just like the first person who will invent perpetual motion. /s PS: to be clear, I'm not saying it's impossible but so far, just like perpetual motion or the Fountain of Youth it's an exciting idea anybody can easily understand yet nobody solved since it's been phrased out. It's not a solved problem and assuming it suddenly is is simply a (marketing) lie.

I think the threshold is way below self improve at 0.1% per day. I wonder what is it? At 0.1% is already going to eat the world a couple of months I think

exponential vs S-curve, it's not so much about the pace as to where the plateau is. If it goes very fast but plateau at 10% then it's still at generalist at toddler level with very niche expertise in some areas but then point is that even with drastically more resources it's stuck there. Meanwhile if the plateau is at 80% but a slower pace then it's a totally different situation. Nobody knows but people selling the technology are claiming it's both going fast and with a high plateau.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#338
My father uses ChatGPT extensively. My friend, whos an electrician, but has 0 things to do with computers, even called it Chat once and I said who? Because for me its ChatGPT. He also uses it extensively. Although I would bet they won't be willing to pay, advertisements will eventually hit them. And with inference prices going down, with distilled models being used, OpenAI will profit, and people will still hapily use it for whatever random queries they have. Exposure is the currency and OpenAI will have infinites of it for the foreseeable future.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#339

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.

And the reason I stopped using it

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#340
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have heard "cloud code" many times from colleagues who do not really know what either cloud OR Claude Code is more than "stuff we should use".

Whisper voice to text very rarely manages to make it Claude, here's some examples and I am not trying to make it bad

Lord code, close code, Clawed code, load code, Claude Chatbot, Claude Code, cloud code.

I wish it had a better name. We know it was named after Claude Shannon. A very nerdy choice rather than a marketeer.

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