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How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's this thing called power of defaults. If a setting is default, if an app is presented on the front they'll continue to use it as it is. The crowd here always overestimates how competent/interested the general public are in these things. 99.9% (source: my life) of users never even open the second level of the settings app. 99% don't even open the settings app. They don't know how much they can even change or ca…

Sure defaults are extremely powerful - but that's rather my point - where is the default that OpenAI controls? Google, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft ( and various Chinese companies ) etc are largely are in control of defaults - via devices and browsers. Perhaps in Github copilot ( via MS ) - but software developers are not typical consumers. Perhaps Sam and johnnies new assistant thing will transform the market - but unt…

Yes this was not relevant to the main topic of openai. I'm just responding to the statement made by the parent comment.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#552
post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”?

The difference is that in a software project you can throw more than one instance of the model at the code. If you tell it to follow your naming conventions and it fails to do so, that can be picked up by an instance of the same LLM that's running checks before you commit anything. Even though it's the same model it'll usually detect stuff like that. You can even have it do multiple passes.

The way most people are coding with AI today is like Baby's First AI™ compared to how we'll all be using LLMs for coding in the future. Soon that "double check everything" step will be built in to the coding agents and you'll have configuration options for how many passes you want it to perform (speed VS accuracy tradeoff).

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't see the problem with a multi billion dollar project not able to give a correction answer to a trivial question? This tech is supposed to revolutionize business, increase productivity to unfathomable levels, automate all our dull boring tasks so we can focus on interesting things! Where have you been the past 4 years?

Billion-dollar businesses had trouble answering trivial questions before AI. The promise of LLMs is that it could actually improve the situation!

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy for me to download a different app. Not easy for me to get everyone I communicate with to download a different app. I don't see the laziness lock in working nearly as effectively for something outside of messaging.

Coca Cola would like to have a word with you. These models respond differently and have their own "personality". Even in coding, there are people who swear by one model over the other. I know engineers who just stick with Claude and could not care to try Codex. For them, if it's not broken, why fix it?

Not sure how many developers are like me, but I am very open to Claude, very open to Gemini, open to open source models (including gpt-oss), but am very reluctant to use frontier OpenAI models. The Microsoft distrust runs extremely deep, the browser authentication dance demanded of users for ChatGPT was the most extreme of the major frontier models, and early OpenAI API service stability was absolutely terrible. Llama had my back back then.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#555
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get plenty of creepy engagement hacking with claude’s chat too now. Before memory it was better.

You can always turn it off

I want some useful memory but it seems hardcoded to try shoehorn in personal details or tidbits from past conversations into responses. Even if I specifically ask it not to in my personalization prompt.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#556

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…

If you haven’t used codex with gpt-5.3-codex (high or xhigh) you are missing out. Claude is still good at conversations but boy I can have codex go at a problem and it does better than Claude almost all the time. Front end and product UX Claude is slightly better but given the very very generous limits of codex, they are the best bang for buck

Has it been sped up at all? Last time I used codex (which was with 5.1 I think), it was pretty slow. I mean, it did a fantastic job at figuring out hard bugs across multiple languages ("why is this image not lining up in this server-rendered template?"; Python, JS, CSS, and the template lang) but it took quite a long time. Long enough that I wouldn't want to use it for anything but the most complex things.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works great on bol.com and Amazon.nl for me.

You know, I just tried to search on Amazon.de and it worked without ChatGPT. Is it a thing with the .nl-tld that you have to use ChatGPT for something simple like that? ;-)

a) It's not only Amazon and Bol

b) Do you seriously think I have time or will to sift through billions of Chinese crap that filled those marketplaces to find EU made products?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy for me to download a different app. Not easy for me to get everyone I communicate with to download a different app. I don't see the laziness lock in working nearly as effectively for something outside of messaging.

Coca Cola would like to have a word with you. These models respond differently and have their own "personality". Even in coding, there are people who swear by one model over the other. I know engineers who just stick with Claude and could not care to try Codex. For them, if it's not broken, why fix it?

> Even in coding, there are people who swear by one model over the other

I just swear at the models. =P But jokes aside, I liked Claude Code and found it a big productivity boost for a month or two. Then the honeymoon phase slowly ended and I realized how much of its code I was rewriting myself. I don't use assistants anymore except to summarize changes for commit messages or PRs (and then I rewrite those summaries).

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#560
post #382
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advertising requires good user models to work… …and yet, everywhere I go I see massive advertisements on billboards, the sides of buildings, public transit, movie screens…

Yes, but still, targeting is done even in billboards based on the location's demographics based on census data. It's not random. Some countries in Asia (like Singapore, Malaysia) have digital bill boards to target certain demographics based on the time of the day or the estimated crowd demographic at a given bus stop. And a few of them even track eyeballs to count "views" of the ad.

I admit this is a factor I hadn't much considered. I'm sure at some point, if not already, the data collected by your phone will enable the equivalent of a tracking pixel on your physical location, so you can get personalized ads when you step into the subway car: the system will quickly evaluate which rider is most likely to spend money based on ads, and on what, and then an auction will be run in two nanoseconds and the winner will show their 10-second transit clip. Oof.

The saddest part is, the old kind of advertising worked just fine, before all the companies got addicted to AdCrack.

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