I'm on the verge of unsubscribing from Stratechery. The last month has been a bunch of fawning over Meta, YouTube, and constant talk about and fawning over OpenAI and whatever latest models are coming out. It's kind of tiring and boring. I swear I heard them talk about some YouTube influencers event like five times across their different shows and across time. Like, I do not care at all.
It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
51–60 of 284 posts
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#52Can 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?
Once you have the weights, actually running these models is easy. The code is not complicated - they are just huge in terms of memory requirements.
Deep learning has now been around for a long time. Running these models is well understood.
obviously running them at scale for multiple users is more difficult.
The actual front ends are not complicated - as is evidenced by the number of open source equivalents.
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#53Platforms 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 why they're working on consumer hardware
And business partnerships, government partnerships, and AI regulation (to establish laws that keep competitors out). Sam knows they have no moat and will try every avenue to establish one.
As Peter Thiel says: “competition is for losers”
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#54Platforms 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…
> 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 driver model. I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS vendors (say Ora to Ingress) was also "an afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not…
> I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS vendors (say oracle to postgres) was also "an afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not 'universal' interfaces.
The bigger problem is that there was never a way to move data between oracle->postgres in pure data form (i.e. point pgsql at your oracle folder and it "just works"). Migration is always a pain, and thus there is a substantial degree of stickiness, due to the cost of moving databases both in terms of risk and effort.
In contrast, vendors [1] are literally offering third party LLMS (such as claude) in addition to their own and offering one-click switching. This means users can try and if they desire switch with little friction.
[1] https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2025/09/introducing-claude-age...
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could say the same thing about Facebook...
People say you're wrong but I agree. Facebook is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man between you and your friends/family. Instead of just talking to your family normally, like over the phone, now you have to talk to them in between mountains of Sponsored Content and AI-generated propaganda. It provides no productive value to the world except for making the world more annoying and making people more isolated f…
> Worrying that our parents' retirement depends heavily on their valuations!
Maybe you should short the stock to hedge your parents' retirement :)
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#56Platforms 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…
The play OpenAI is making has nothing to do with the underlying models any more. They release good ones but it doesn't really matter, they're going for being the place people land when they open a web browser. That is incredibly sticky and not easily replaced. Being the company that replaces the phrase "oh just Google it" is worth half the money in the world, and I think they're well on their way to getting there.
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#57Platforms 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…
they understand that, and that's why they're making it sticky by adding in app purchasing, advertising, integrations. also why they hired OGs from IG/FB. They are building the moat and hoping that first to market is going to work out.
I do not believe that advertising and purchasing is at the top of the list of things what make software sticky
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#58Can 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?
Intersection of cloud compute power being plentiful combined with existing LMs. As I understand it, right now, it's really just throwing compute power at existing LMs to learn on gigantic datasets.
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#59Can 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?
I imagine it wasn't as immediate as it might look on the outside. If they all were working independently on similar ideas for a while, one of them launching their product might have caused the others to scramble to get theirs out as well to avoid missing the train.
I think it's also worth pointing out that the polish on these products was not actually there on day one. I remember the first week or so after ChatGPT's initial launch being full of stories and screenshots of people fairly easily getting around some of the intended limitations with silly methods like asking it to write a play where the dialogue has the topic it refused to talk about directly or asking it to give examples about what types of things it's not allowed to say in response to certain questions. My point isn't that there wasn't a lot of technical knowledge that went into the initial launch, but that it's a bit of an oversimplification to view things at a binary where people didn't know how to do it before, but then they did.
Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it
#60Platforms 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…
> 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 driver model. I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS vendors (say Ora to Ingress) was also "an afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not…
If you are doing things “properly” then you have good evals that let you test the behaviour of different LLMs and see if they work for your problem.
The vendors have all standardised on OpenAIs API surface - you can use OpenAIs SDK with a number of providers - so switching is very easy. There are also quite a few services that offer this as a service.
The real test is does a different LLM work - hence the need to evals to check.