Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 693 posts

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#591

Post by jjfoooo4 »

theptip wrote: post #24

I think this take underestimates a couple points: 1) the opportunities for vertical integration are huge. Anthropic originally said they didn’t want to build IDEs, then realized the pivot to Claude Code was available to them. Likewise when one of these companies can gobble up Legal, Medical, etc why would they let companies like Harvey capture the margins? 2) oss models are 6-12 months behind the frontier because of…

Tech has been trying to "gobble up" legal, medical, etc for decades. I'm quite skeptical a newcomer with a powerful model will be able to penetrate them, especially while selling those incumbents access to the same models they are building on.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#592

Post by simg »

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…

>on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere.

they can be super easily moved. just use the existing export feature, all a competitor needs is ability to import conversations.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#593

Post by parliament32 »

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…

"Near billion users", yet less than 5% pay them a single penny[1]. Like you said, the vast majority of these will never pay anything, but I'd argue the majority will migrate to the "next" free provider as soon as OpenAI starts inserting too many ads into the product.

I watched my partner switch from OAI to DeepSeek during the last outage and she hasn't been back to OAI since. I am skeptical there is any actual stickyness when basically all of the chatbots do the same thing for the casual user.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/openais_chatgpt_popul...

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#594

Post by outside1234 »

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 don't know. I switched to Gemini and haven't missed anything from OpenAI even for a second. I could switch back to OpenAI and not miss anything from Gemini. I don't feel the stickiness AT ALL.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#595

Post by outside1234 »

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…

This is what Netscape thought too

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#596

Post by bigyabai »

nozzlegear wrote: post #584
bigyabai wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. It's not a good point, it's an assumption based on elitism, just like your assumption that nobody is doing anything other than Snapchat or Instagram on…

Almost nobody is doing anything other than Snapchat or Instagram on their iPhones. That's the point, "the overwhelming volume of Apple sales" was the original claim and they're absolutely right. Compare every single Apple product on volume and you will not approach the volume of iPhones being sold. Even cult-classic product lines like the Mac cannot hold a candle in comparison to Airpods sales volume.

If the iPhone was a branded Android device, then sure, maybe this would be an elitist argument. But the iPhone is a proprietary platform with a locked-down browser, locked-down store, locked-down GPU drivers and OTA updates that decide how long your battery lasts. It is not elitist to point out that Apple customers by-and-large ignore these facts, it's the objective circumstances of the smartphone market.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#597

Post by browningstreet »

Ever since OpenAI stuck the "Memory almost full" ad banner at the bottom of every chat, I've moved away from them. I have Grok in my car, Alexa+ on my alexas, Gemini Plus from my Google Workspace account, Microsoft Copilot at work, Claude Code because I like it, Opencode because it's free enough -- by spreading my chats around I'm not beholden to any single of them.

None of these can't be moved away from immediately. Even with my github repos, I use Antigravity, Claude Code, Opencode, and I might try Codex. I use one of them as a primary more than the other, but they're as close to interchangeable as possible.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#598

Post by noelsusman »

jsenn wrote: post #402
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #222

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”?

From the model's perspective it's completely different. LLMs have no concept of what a letter is due to the way they're trained.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#599

Post by tantalor »

vaylian wrote: post #588
tantalor wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife, for example, uses [Netscape Navigator] 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 [bookmarks] on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. See how stupid it sounds?

Given how long people have stuck with Internet Explorer, I don't think this is a good example.

Internet Explorer doesn't exist anymore!

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#600

Post by famouswaffles »

swexbe wrote: post #587
famouswaffles wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However if OpenAI start trying to make money off those users by adding advertising, or removing the free tier, then things may change. Tech forums tend to be in a bit of a bubble. People said the same thing about Netflix and it just quickly became their most popular sub. People don't care about advertising unless it's really obnoxious. The idea that people will unsub en masse once Open AI starts rolling ads is a pip…

Customers come back to Netflix since they have the best content out of all the streaming providers. This is their moat. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is literally exactly identical to their competitors for the most common use cases.

Customers stay at Netflix because it's cheap, what they're used to, and it has enough on the catalogue to keep people satisfied most of the time. They're not constantly evaluating who has the better catalogue. And most of that catalogue is content they have no real ownership of anyway, at least, until the WB buyout is finalized.

And Netflix is hardly the only example. Like clockwork, people here say the same thing about anyone including ads, to the same result - No-one cares.

This is just one of those things that is popular to say in these kinds of forums but has no bearing in real life. Most people are sticky with products they're satisfied with. They don't switch unless a competitor is:

- much cheaper

- much better

Neither of these is the case in the LLM consumer space. Nobody cares or notices that gemini topped the benchmarks for a couple months before being dethroned, and as far as new features and improvements is concerned, Open AI is the clear leader. All everyone did and still does is follow their lead, even down to the pricing model. Basically every single feature/model improvement you can think of in the LLM consumer space is something Open AI brought first and they get almost all the buzz from it.

Post reply on HN