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How will OpenAI compete?

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#401

Post by jcfrei »

operatingthetan wrote: post #264
fhd2 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's one of those super easy things that 90% of the users just never do - like changing their default search engine, export their social graph, install ad blockers, etc.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#402

Post by jsenn »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #222
bandrami wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I asked mistral to list five mammals that don't have "e" in their name. Number three was "otter" and number five was "camel". phi4-mini-reasoning took the same prompt and bailed out because (at least according to its trace) it interpreted it as meaning "can't have a, e, i, o, or u in the name". Local is the only inference paradigm I'm interested in, but these things have a way to go.

I don't really see the problem here. Yeah, we know that these models are not good for actual logic. These models are lossy data compression and most-likely-responses-from-internet-forums-and-articles machines. This kind of parlor tricks are not interesting and just because a model can list animals with or without some letters in their names doesn't mean anything especially since it isn't like the model "thinks" in En…

Is this parlour trick so different from useful tasks like “implement this feature while following the naming conventions of my project”?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#403

Post by estearum »

puppymaster wrote: post #397
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…

several of my friends named their chatgpt 'Amanda' or 'George' because they talked about real mental issues with it. I don't see them moving to another platform because that's essentially asking them to leave their 'best friend/therapist'.

... your friends should probably see a human therapist before going much further... I don't mean this in a flippant or insulting way.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#404

Post by heavyset_go »

tim333 wrote: post #331
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…

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.

You can turn a local model on and off as needed, and it will still function as expected. If you turn off your self-hosted server, you don't get email.

With self-hosted email, you need persistent infrastructure and domain knowledge to leverage it. With a local model, you just click a button and tell it what to do.

With email, there is a necessary burden to outsource. Your local model is just there like Chrome/Edge/Safari is just there, there is no burden.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#405

Post by wolvesechoes »

sauercrowd wrote: post #322
mi_lk wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by this argument Google will win though. Identical interface with similar quality answers

I wish it would be, but it's not. Gemini feels more sluggish, it's relatively overloaded with animations compared to chatgpt. Like most Google products.

> Like most Google products.

And yet Google has search monopoly, is part of mobile duopoly, has almost monopoly on e-mail and data storage, is strong player in office solutions, and owns the biggest entertainment platform in form of YT.

Seems like sluggishness and animations don't mean as much to normal people.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#406

Post by morkalork »

simonw wrote: post #94
chii wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, how is it any worse than 'google'? chatgpt is generic (as in, no prior meaning attached, except for the few people in the world who understand what GPT stands for). It's simple - even a non-english speaker can say it easily, and doesn't require one to be native to know how to pronounce it (this is a difficult concept for a native english speaker to grok). These features makes for a good name.

"Google" at least doesn't have an acronym for "Generative pre-trained transformer" baked into it.

Car brands are like that, does the average person know or care what GT, RX, STI, WRX etc mean?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#407

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #219
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end. For myself, I use LLMs daily and I would even say a lot on some days and I _did_ pay the 20€/mo subscription for ChatGPT, but with the latest model I cannot justify that anymore. 4o was amazingly good even if it had some parasocial issues with some people, it actually did what I expect an LLM to do. Now the quality of the 5.whatever has gone dra…

>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…

> Don't underestimate advertising.

OpenAI is talking out of their ass with their advertising plans. Meta and Google are an advertising duopoly, extremely anti-competitive, and basically defrauding their own customers. OpenAI can't just replicate that.

Worse still is that OpenAI has no competitive edge. All the hype around their advertising plans is based on the idea that they can blend the ads right into the response, a turbocharged version of Native Advertising.

This is explicitly illegal. Very explicitly.

The US' FTC may have been declawed by the current US government, but the rest of the west will nuke them from orbit over it. Doubtless OpenAI will try some stunt alike marking the entire LLM response as "this is an ad", but that won't satisfy the regulators.

This only gets worse with further problems. An LLM hallucinating product features is going to invoke regulator wrath as well, and an LLM deciding to cut off the adcopy early will invoke the wrath of the advertiser.

> 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

Also important: Not anymore. The tech giants are now issuing quite a lot of debt to pay for the AI plans.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#408

Post by carlosjobim »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #218
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…

Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end. For myself, I use LLMs daily and I would even say a lot on some days and I _did_ pay the 20€/mo subscription for ChatGPT, but with the latest model I cannot justify that anymore. 4o was amazingly good even if it had some parasocial issues with some people, it actually did what I expect an LLM to do. Now the quality of the 5.whatever has gone dra…

Most potential customers wouldn't ever think in terms as "justifying" a €20 purchase when the product is great.

ChatGPT (and competitors) is an incredibly high value tool, and €20 per month is nothing for somebody who wants or needs it. It's just a matter of if they use it enough to start hitting the daily limits.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#409

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

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 that kind of inertia mostly lasts as long as there is no financial incentive to move. A ChatGPT user who is not paying anything to OpenAI is of little benefit to them, and has little incentive to switch. However if OpenAI start trying to make money off those users by adding advertising, or removing the free tier, then things may change. Google can afford to subsidize chat from their other revenue streams, but OpenAI can't.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#410

Post by torginus »

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 defaultism plays a huge role. If your wife's next smartphone or TV or whatever comes with AI made by a different company, I think she won't really care and use that if it's good.

By the way this is a perfectly rational stance. If the supermarket next to me stopped stocking Coca Cola, I would just by Pepsi.

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