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How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#61

Post by hyperbovine »

goolz wrote: post #41
morkalork wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I commute on the train, I see students studying with it. I go for brunch on the weekend, I see parents consulting it while at the table with their infants. I'm at work, colleagues are using it all day. I leave work and I overhear the random woman smoking in the alleyway talking on her cellphone saying "so I asked chatgpt". It's mind-bogglingly pervasive, the last time something had such a seizmic cultural impact like…

How many of those people are paying? I think many say “use ChatGPT” to mean any LLM. As you noted it seems you just see ChatGPT in the wild but that is anecdotal. It is certainly pervasive right now. But I know a lot of people currently switching to Gemini. I personally prefer claude models for all my work. If I were them I would be very worried. They are never giving us AGI and I am skeptical they are worth .5 trill…

Gemini is nearly unusable thanks to “subsidies”. I honestly don’t see what the path is to these companies making any money short of massive price hikes, or electricity suddenly becoming free.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#62

Post by com2kid »

deepfriedbits wrote: post #27
com2kid wrote: post #17

Sometimes I like to imagine what this would be like if the technology had appeared 25 years ago. First off, nonetheless open publishing stuff. Everything would have been trade secrets. Next off no interoperable json apis instead binary APIs that are hard to integrate with and therefore sticky. Once you spent 3 or 4 months getting your MCP server setup, no way would you ever try to change to a different vendor! The nu…

Could they have even trained the models 25 years ago? Wikipedia was nothing close to what it is today and I know folks here like to mourn the fall of the open web, but it's still orders of magnitude larger today than it was in 2001. YouTube, so many information stores that simply didn't exist then.

The book archives are a big one as well, all the journals that have been published digitally throughout the 2000s, and all the newspapers.

Though with some types of models (specifically voice) it has been discovered that a smaller high quality dataset is better than a giant dataset filled with errors.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#63

Post by smugma »

gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #54
SecretDreams wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much is your wife paying for the privilege to use OAI presently?

This is the real question. Is she willing to pay $20 per month when Google's Gemini is free? Google can remain irrational longer than OAI can remain solvent.

I understand the underlying quote but not how/why it’s being used here. How is Google giving Gemini away for free to undercut OAI irrational? Anticompetitive, maybe.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#64

Post by hattmall »

kshacker wrote: post #48
ryanlitalien wrote: post #45

I speak native English and barebones high school Spanish. I recently visited Costa Rica and almost every time there was a language barrier issue (unknown word or phrase), the local folks opened ChatGPT, said what they were trying to say in Spanish and then had ChatGPT convert it to English. It was everywhere.

I have done that at my home. My wife calls maids. They are there. I need to go to restroom. Ask my wife. She is struggling to communicate. It took me 3 seconds to realize ChatGPT could help. And it did.

Nice that ChatGPT does that, its also true that Google Translate and other APPs have had this functionality for a decade or more. I was getting live German translated on my phone in 2015 with no problems.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#65

Post by bdangubic »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #59
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…

> people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. I just asked it to build me a searchable indexed downloaded version of all my conversations. One shot, one html page, everything exported (json files). I’m sure I could ask Claude to import it. I don’t see the moat.

there is no moat also because conversation history is useless. like saying “I cant move to DDG cause Google has my search history”

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#66

Post by ziznznzb »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #59
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…

> people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. I just asked it to build me a searchable indexed downloaded version of all my conversations. One shot, one html page, everything exported (json files). I’m sure I could ask Claude to import it. I don’t see the moat.

How do you know all your conversations are in there?

Honest question I have this issue a lot with AI claims. Nobody verifies the output.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#67

Post by hyperbovine »

sinenomine wrote: post #13

People underestimate the lead OAI has with their post-5.2 models. The author does not strike me as someone who closely follows the progress frontier labs make in US and around the world.

Agreed, compare the frontier models from Google and OAI. It’s like night and day. Anyone who says “the tech has caught up” has not spent even one day using Gemini 3.1 to try and accomplish something complicated.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#68

Post by simonw »

ziznznzb wrote: post #66
lll-o-lll wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. I just asked it to build me a searchable indexed downloaded version of all my conversations. One shot, one html page, everything exported (json files). I’m sure I could ask Claude to import it. I don’t see the moat.

How do you know all your conversations are in there? Honest question I have this issue a lot with AI claims. Nobody verifies the output.

So far I've not seen anyone complain that their conversations have gone missing. There's a GDPR-style export option that I've used a few times for my own.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#69

Post by SecretDreams »

smugma wrote: post #63
gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real question. Is she willing to pay $20 per month when Google's Gemini is free? Google can remain irrational longer than OAI can remain solvent.

I understand the underlying quote but not how/why it’s being used here. How is Google giving Gemini away for free to undercut OAI irrational? Anticompetitive, maybe.

Agree. And we don't even know if they're bleeding out doing it. Google is on more efficient hardware and they fully control their ecosystem. And that ecosystem can feed into and be fed by their other ecosystems. OAI just has LLMs.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#70

Post by keyle »

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…

It would literally take you 5 mins to set up your wife with a competing client for her needs.

Sure it's 'sticky' at least a little, but it's not a moat. A moat is a show stopper like they own you.

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