Live data from Hacker News

How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

571–580 of 693 posts

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#571

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…

> people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere

Neither can they be easily searched nor organized. And what prolonged AI use teaches you is: don't search for that old chat, just ask anew.

That particular piece of flypaper isn't as sticky as it may seem.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#572
post #336
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…

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.

> Absolutely no enduser knows what 'GPT' stands for

But there is no need to know what it stands for.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#573
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

I think car names like that are awful too.

(Clearly the car marketing world and the general public disagree with me there.)

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#574

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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Apple is a two sided market between developers and users. OpenAI has not succeeded in building this so far.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know anything five years down the road? You don't even know where you yourself will be. When proven wrong, hackers always say "Well in 5 years time or in 10 years time, things might have changed, so I was right and you were wrong". It limits your own reasoning capabilities, and your satisfaction of always being right yet again will start diminishing with time.

Well said. I think people don't know when to just back down. Arguing the latest reply becomes a reflex rather than a 2-way discussion.

I'm trying to motivate one or hopefully both of these ideas

- if it is worth backup up or exporting, it is worth doing it early and often

- but more importantly if we backing up and exporting, we should be continuously thinking are we even on the right platform? Does a better alternative exist?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#577

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…

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…

> the moat of 'users won't be arsed to download a different app'???

don't even need to download anything, just open your browser and go to google.com to use gemini

last week-end, I've seen a non-tech friend who previously used chatGPT on his phone, just go on google to ask stuff to the AI (they have no idea it's gemini and it doesn't matter)

if you are not looking for having some kind of relationship with an AI (from what I understand people use chatGPT for this use case), but just looking for an AI to search stuff, then in my opinion you can't beat google search + gemini summary all at once for free with a single prompt

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How could we possibly know this?

They make a good point. Apple's most-popular device is a smartphone that doesn't handle workloads any heavier than Snapchat or Instagram. The value prop of the iPhone is not rooted in the performance or battery life (as Liquid Glass showed us) but just the branding.

Apple makes more money selling iPhone accessories than they make selling Macs. The desktop market share isn't going up, the Mac's lifeline is depreciation of old hardware to force Mac owners into the upgrade cycle: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#579

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 don't think chat history is enough for real stickiness.

But the trillion dollar question is, what is? Now that I think about it, I'd bet heavily on Google. They've got your email, your photos, your location history, yada yada. Once they're able to pull all that into AI and make a reasonably cohesive product out of it, it seems like that's what people would use by default. Plus they've got a browser, search page, and phone OS that all can lead you to their AI.

They could train custom LoRA layers to mimic your tone, encode special tokens that indicate your name and data and various facts about you and your contacts, to make output more accurate, consistent, and personalized. Lots of possibilities for increased stickiness.

Even enterprise-wise, gemini is pretty good at coding and if your company has all its docs on Google docs, that could become a pretty seamless integration. They can even build their agents to prefer GCP, or maybe make that the free tier but have other providers support be more expensive.

At some point, a reasonable business model might be "we replace your engineering team with AI plus a few Google engineers on retainer for when things get wonky," which could scale to pretty large. (Granted this sounds more like a msft power move.)

They already have all the infrastructure, all they need is a reasonable competitor to github. They really screwed up losing out to msft on that one!

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> How could we possibly know this? They make a good point. Apple's most-popular device is a smartphone that doesn't handle workloads any heavier than Snapchat or Instagram. The value prop of the iPhone is not rooted in the performance or battery life (as Liquid Glass showed us) but just the branding. Apple makes more money selling iPhone accessories than they make selling Macs. The desktop market share isn't going up…

iPhones are some sci-fi magic computers. It's incredible how powerful they are.

Most smartphones are.

Post reply on HN