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How will OpenAI compete?

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#601

Post by aeldidi »

chii wrote: post #86
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.

> said what they were trying to say in Spanish and then had ChatGPT convert it to English. It was everywhere. i'm just so surprised they'd use chatgpt to do this, when it's quite as easily (and perhaps faster) to use google translate.

I've had better experience with LLMs translating than any bespoke translation tool, oddly enough. LLMs seemingly have a very good handle on regional varieties. As an example, I've never found a good translator for Lebanese/Syrian Arabic dialects, but ChatGPT was able to easily translate for me, even getting right some lesser used rural accent quirks which I didn't even know how to translate (similar to something like "y'all" in english).

To be fair, I wasn't using it in the way the parent comment described, for me I said: "this person speaking Lebanese/Syrian Arabic said something that sounded like [try my best to replicate the sentence]. What did they most likely mean?" and got a pretty much spot-on answer.

I wonder if this ability translates to other languages, but I wouldn't be able to tell. My Arabic is "good enough" to tell that the translations I got were good, but I'd be interested to here from someone who knows more if, for example fuzhounese translation is any good.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#602

Post by fuzzfactor »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #485
edgyquant wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not the point. The point is that brands build awareness through ads that don’t require clicking and this ha effected you whether you want to admit it or not

And my point is that I don’t care. I don’t watch ads, I don’t buy things because of ads.

Your messages are very consistent, it all adds up and makes perfect sense.

I don't care either.

Online I get lots of ads blocked, but not all, I really don't put much effort into it beyond default.

So what if I am "influenced" if it doesn't effect any significant part of my behavior.

One thing I never do is respond with money.

I'm just not a "consumer" so that goes back before the internet.

Sure I see ads thrown at me which keep me aware of those brands but the only buys I make would happen without any ads.

On the rare occasion that I want to make a significant purchase, then I will seek out the ad. Oh the horror !

But I want to see how honest I think it is compared to a number of reviews. It's really pretty neutral since it's just as much me using the ad as the ad using me, plus equally good for knowing what looks good to buy as knowing what brand not to buy.

Then there's the interesting way when an overall economic downturn gets rougher you see ads for things that almost never need advertising for years in a row, or never have before :\

OTOH you also see some of the most trivial stuff that must be flying off the shelf and all you can do is shake your head ;)

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#603

Post by nfm »

parliament32 wrote: post #593
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 sticky…

Google Search has no stickiness and they managed to build a behemoth.

ChatGPT is a great product, but the lack of stickiness comes into play because there are many viable alternatives.

They’re all going to have to monetise the consumer segment at some stage, and I think that’s likely to be via ads on a freemium tier in most instances.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#604

Post by theptip »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #591
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.

> Tech has been trying to "gobble up" legal, medical, etc for decades

This time it’s different, obviously.

> especially while selling those incumbents access to the same models they are building on.

In the extreme, i think it’s plausible that frontier labs basically stop selling any access to their leading models. Whatever you make available by API will just get distilled. In the vertical integration world, the only way you get access to these models is by contracting with a company to buy a product (requirements in, code/decisions out) rather than direct conversation with the AI.

I don’t think they would unship Opus 4.6, but there isn’t a strong incentive to compete on chatbot intelligence in this world.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#605

Post by ac29 »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #495
WarmWash wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has offered products with little value over competitors for a long time now, but they still get to command a large premium on their products because "the vibes are right". When engineers analyze things they look at the specs, stats, and metrics. When consumers analyze things they look at what others are doing, feel for vibes, roll into the convenience, and stick with the familiar.

> 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.

> For example, I thought there was universal sentiment that apple silicon / M-series computers are pretty unmatched.

5 years ago, sure, but the x86 world has come a long way since Apple dumped Intel. I'd certainly take a 2026 Intel machine over something with an M1-M3.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#606

Post by Esophagus4 »

parliament32 wrote: post #593
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 sticky…

You say 5% of users pay like it’s a shockingly bad number, but that’s almost exactly the same as YouTube’s paid subscribers (125m) vs MAUs (2.5b).

Like it or not, OpenAI is building a real business. It’s obviously capital intensive, but we will see how it goes.

And no, the vast majority will not migrate. Just like the vast majority didn’t migrate away from Google after they launched ads.

I don’t get the HN urge to be the contrarian saying “that’ll never work.”

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#607

Post by schaefer »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #417
agentifysh wrote: post #100

I think this is the best article on open AI that I've ever read. A lot of content these days will try to paint OpenAI in sensational ways that really doesn't get to the bottom of whether open AI has an economic mode, and this article does a very thorough job of explaining why OpenAI doesn't have power like the other platforms. And so this goes back to my theory that open AI's execution is basically to get it itself i…

Altman said that in an interview, that the government would bail out OpenAI.

does anyone have a citation/reference for this?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#608

Post by fuzzfactor »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #218
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…

Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end. For myself, I use LLMs daily and I would even say a lot on some days and I _did_ pay the 20€/mo subscription for ChatGPT, but with the latest model I cannot justify that anymore. 4o was amazingly good even if it had some parasocial issues with some people, it actually did what I expect an LLM to do. Now the quality of the 5.whatever has gone dra…

>no longer searches web for things it doesn't know, but instead guesses.

This could very well have been a cost-reduction effort to try and simulate what it was doing before.

Somebody must think training has already looked at the web enough, or there may be too much slop now that there was no contingency for.

Then you've got tighter guardrails to make it more palatable for a wider audience.

I guess different people would draw the line differently, but when it goes from being worth money to not worth it any more that could be an enshittification effect.

Especially if things like that accelerate.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#609

Post by matthewkayin »

azan_ wrote: post #468
b3kart wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t you think that’s because Google was objectively a head above everyone other search engine for a long time?

It’s not anymore (actually google is awful now) and people are still using it

I've been feeling the pain of google being awful for a while now. Do you have a different search engine you would recommend?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#610

Post by nouveaux »

waffletower wrote: post #554
nouveaux wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Llam…

This is is no way dismissing your concern but I think this reinforces my point about branding. Whether or not Microsoft is handling AI in a responsible way, we don't trust them due to their poor practices on Window.
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