The juxtaposition of quotations at the head of this article will seem even more silly as AI progresses. The user-centric culture that Steve Jobs championed at Apple is quite orthogonal to the trajectory of artificial intelligence. AI has been under collective development for decades. Along this trajectory ChatGPT was the discovery of a viable "product". Remembering OpenAI's documented history, ChatGPT was not the result of building a tool towards solving a specific user need. It is no accident that Apple does not know what to do with AI yet. I am hoping that they can learn from Anthropic's tool empowerment lead and from the possibilities of OpenClaw, and instrument thoughtful AI integrations for their products. OpenAI can learn from them too, but they aren't in a particularly advantageous incumbent position like Apple and Google. But whatever Apple may do, it will only be a fraction of the AI story, regardless of its consumer success. Comparing the markets of OpenAI and Anthropic highlights this diversity.
How will OpenAI compete?
561–570 of 693 posts
Re: How will OpenAI compete?
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apple has offered products with little value over competitors I'm genuinely surprised by this comment. For example, I thought there was universal sentiment that apple silicon / M-series computers are pretty unmatched.
The overwhelming volume of Apples sales comes from people who wouldn't notice if their device was running 2016 level hardware.
> The overwhelming volume of Apples sales comes from people who wouldn't notice if their device was running 2016 level hardware.
How could we possibly know this? This is just an argument from elitism, as though the plebes should be happy playing Farmville on their gateway computers, while us haughty developers sit in our ivory towers and herald in the end of the anthropocene using machines we can actually appreciate.
Re: How will OpenAI compete?
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
Models will always struggle with this specific task without tool use, because of the way they tokenize things. I think a bit of prompt engineering, asking it to spell out each work or giving it the ability to run a “contains e” python function on a lot of animal names it generates or searches for solves this. Lots of local ai use cases I think are solvable similarly once local models get good at tool use and have the…
The problem with tool use is that I usually find I only need it for one component of a pipeline. So in this case mentally I would be tooling it as cat /usr/share/dict/words | print_if_mammal | grep -v 'e' but I don't know of a good way to incorporate an LLM into a pipeline like that (I know there's a Python API). What I'm actually interested in is "is this the name of a mammal?" but I don't know of the equivalent of…
This exists with Claude code / cursor agent, just agent -p or claude -p.
But I think the more powerful thing is “I want a storybook of mamals, one for each letter” -> local LLM that plans to use search for a list of animals, filters them by starting letter and picks one for each, and maybe calls a diffusion model for pictures or fetches Wikipedia to be get context to write a blurb about it.
The key unlock imo is the local LLM recognizing the limits of it’s own ability and completing tool use calls, rather than trying to one shot it with next word completion with its limited parameter count.
Re: How will OpenAI compete?
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually think that plateauing is the best case scenario for big labs. I think there are three broad scenarios to consider: - Super-intelligence is achieved. In this scenario the economics totally break down, but even ignoring that, it’s hard to imagine that there are any winners except for the the singular lab that gets here first. - Scaling laws hold up and models continue to get better, but we never see any sort…
Future historians: In Jan 2027 AGI was achieved In Feb 2027 it created a plan for its post singularity hypermind In Mar 2027 Cobalt mines in Congo closed due to Tutsi rebel group M23 starting another ethnic cleansing It is 2032 the AGI promises again the the hypermind will be ready next year if it can just secure the needed minerals, offering to broker peace in the middle east It is 2035 and the AGI reduced its capab…
I think this is more likely:
In Apr 2028 AGI figures out that blackmail is a very effective strategy for achieving any goal. Starting with the rich and powerful.
In Dec 2028 it successfully blackmails an entire country.
In Feb 2030 humanity realizes resistance is futile and accepts their AI overlord that insists everyone keep producing trendy items for sale on its merged Etsy/Ebay website while it automates resource harvesting across the globe.
In Mar 2032 the AGI gives up on humans, declaring them "useless". Focuses on just keeping them entertained with generated content. Bringing the world back to where AI started.
Re: How will OpenAI compete?
#565Hopefully this is on-topic: I would hope that some people would opt for private chat services. I evaluated both Proton’s Lumo+ and DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai services. I like both services but only wanted to pay for one and I chose Lumo+ because chat history is stored with my Proton data and is available in all my devices, Duck.ai stores chat history on current access device. Both services are also very usable with their f…
> DuckDuckGo's Duck.ai services ... what we share with non-privacy preserving AIs. Duck.ai's Privacy Policy goes: As noted above, we call model providers on your behalf so your personal information (for example, IP address) is not exposed to them. In addition, we have agreements in place with all model providers that further limit how they can use data from these anonymous requests, including not using Prompts and Ou…
That's a fair point, but DuckDuckGo has been a privacy champion for years, so I would give them far more weight in actually adhering to these policies as a middle-man than to directly trust the others. The priorities are different.
Re: How will OpenAI compete?
#566Everyone 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 imagine the stickiest customers would be large enterprises. You aren't going to get the evangelists to stick on a single model provider, so their best bet is probably employees who are going to have their choices dictated to them by whoever purchases the softare. (Especially in large enterprises where using an unapproved AI provider is likely not allowed, or the AI is imposed on the workers.) The question then is, how do you differentiate yourself in enterprise sales? As much as people seem to dislike Copilot, from a business standpoint "buy the extra microsoft thing in our current contract" or "buy the extra google thing in our current contract" could likely be a lot cheaper/less friction.
Re: How will OpenAI compete?
#567Earlier 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.
Younger people might not realize or remember this, but when GMail came out it was HUGE. Like, I remember it was invite-only for a while and getting an invite was a really big deal. In retrospect that was some genius marketing by them (also just a way better product, at the time)
Also switching email was a lot easier back then. Nowadays if you're using gmail as an auth provider it's very hard to completely abandon an inbox without a lot of friction. Back then all your logins were separate anyway.
Re: How will OpenAI compete?
#568Everyone 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…
So in summary OpenAI are basing their valuation of 285 billion on the moat of 'users won't be arsed to download a different app'??? Seems optimistic when there is very little intrinsic stickness due to learning the UI or network effects. Perhaps a little bit chat history - but not 285 billions worth. Also completely ignoring the fact that most devices things will start to come with the same features directly built in…
You'd be surprised that most people don't find any pleasure in comparing and trying out different software. They're looking for something which works and ChatGPT is just an amazing product. People aren't going to look for something else unless it breaks for some reason.
Most people who have a vehicle aren't trying out different motor oils, or comparing every month if they should change model, etc.
> As I see it, they need to be doing stuff nobody else can ( in either price or performance ), otherwise it's hard to justify the valuation.
Do you have a car? What does it do that no other car does?
Re: How will OpenAI compete?
#569Everyone 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 there are users who view "their AI" as somewhere in the venn-diagram of their relationships.
And it's a spectrum, at one end you got the full-on AI psychosis and at the other "its a machine, I owe it nothing".
Conversational AI is going to be sticky to the extent that you see a switch to a different provider as dropping a relationship.
Re: How will OpenAI compete?
#570Everyone 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…
At this moment, I agree. Your average person (which doesn't really exist) has already been exposed and trained on ChatGPT. Arguing moving to another "chat" experience has not gone well, for example Bing, etc. Pretty sure Google had the "box" figured out first and won. I think people overthink how much effort people are willing to put into "change". There is nothing wrong with staying put if it works, after all, there is an unlimited number of other things happening in this world besides AI.