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How will OpenAI compete?

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#621

Post by Imanari »

coreyburnsdev wrote: post #496
gizmodo59 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven’t used codex with gpt-5.3-codex (high or xhigh) you are missing out. Claude is still good at conversations but boy I can have codex go at a problem and it does better than Claude almost all the time. Front end and product UX Claude is slightly better but given the very very generous limits of codex, they are the best bang for buck

this is my experience as well, just cancelled my claude subscription as I'm tired of it the 5 hour window being filled up within 30 minutes of use, and not even fixing the problem that codex finds almost immediately. also found for frontend that gemini 3.1 pro is better than the rest if you really play with it.

How is gemini 3.1 doing in agentic harnesses? Did they catch up?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#622

Post by soleveloper »

bandrami wrote: post #208
soleveloper wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Treat LLMs as dyslexic when it comes to spelling. Assess their strengths and weaknesses accordingly.

They're literally text generators so that's... troubling

There are incredible authors who happen to be dyslexic, and brilliant mathematicians who struggle with basic arithmetic. We don't dismiss their core work just because a minor lemma was miscalculated or a word was misspelled. The same logic applies here: if we dismiss the semantic capabilities of these models based entirely on their token-level spelling flaws, we miss out on their actual utility.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#623

Post by UltraSane »

kbelder wrote: post #619
UltraSane wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude is a terrible name but Gemini is pretty good.

Names-wise, I think 'Grok' is pretty good, there's just lots of other baggage that comes along with it. I still hate how Microsoft ruined the value in the name 'Cortana'. If they had a modern LLM named Cortana with the right voice, I'd be very tempted to use it just because. What other LLM has a face associated with it?

Grok is way too nerdy and obscure.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#624

Post by Lramseyer »

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…

Yeah, I was a bit surprised that the author didn't mention that facet of Open AI. It did mention infrastructure goals, but the reality is that Open AI's infrastructure spending commitments have inflated the stock prices of quite a few hardware companies (like Micron and WD) and caused a strain on the market.

The real danger here is how over-leveraged Open AI is. No other AI player is as exposed. Their massive spending commitments are all precariously balanced on the other end by their user base, and if that evaporates, the whole thing will fall apart and that could crash the stocks of other players ...and by crash, I mean bring them down to a realistic value. But the economy is counting on this to work, which is why I believe that Open AI's strategy here really is to make the market exposed to Open AI's risks.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#625

Post by rvnx »

adventured wrote: post #616
Esophagus4 wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OpenAI is sitting on top of a $100+ billion ad revenue business just waiting to happen. Those 95% of users not paying anything are about to start paying something.

They can't afford to wait.

OpenAI every day is closer and closer to collapse, they urgently need an IPO to pass the hot potato to someone else.

They have 35B USD in the bank.

They did 13B USD in revenue in 2025, and in 2026 they plan to spend 55B USD.

They are already dead if they don't find new people to lend them money.

One of the solution is to sell the company to fools (the general public / IPO), so founders and investors can get away with it and, buy a bit of runway for the company.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#626

Post by tyjen »

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…

My nontechnical friends only know about ChatGPT, all other LLMs are a complete and total mystery to them outside of what is built into Google's search engine and Copilot. I imagine they represent the majority of consumers. It'd require significant marketing campaign for most of them to switch or for OpenAI to make a substantial mistake.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#627

Post by twelve40 »

tyjen wrote: post #626
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…

My nontechnical friends only know about ChatGPT, all other LLMs are a complete and total mystery to them outside of what is built into Google's search engine and Copilot. I imagine they represent the majority of consumers. It'd require significant marketing campaign for most of them to switch or for OpenAI to make a substantial mistake.

do they use facebook or instagram? meta jammed their LLM into the search box there. Do they use google at all? the AI summary produced by Gemini leads you to click on "more details" with gemini.

so while this is technically true: > My nontechnical friends only know about ChatGPT

they may actually use a ton of other LLMs without knowing

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#628

Post by arw0n »

111111101101 wrote: post #521
DrScientist wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Chrome has about 75% market share across all platforms - probably 90% of those use the google default. As far as I'm aware OpenAI doesn't control any defaults for which AIChat service to use.

It took Google a decade before they released Chrome so OpenAI has plenty of time to have a Chrome moment. Maybe it'll be something that comes from the OpenClaw acqui-hires?

Google wasn't bleeding money like crazy at the time. Google was operating in a post-hype cycle. We are most likely somewhere in an epsilon around the peak of the AI hype and OpenAI is more comparable to AOL or Yahoo. One striking similarity is the inability to innovate themselves, instead relying on copying others or acquiring.

The OpenClaw guy is surely a decent product person, but OpenClaw did not innovate in any real sense. He was just pushing an existing idea to the limit without any concern for quality or security. It had its hype moment, it inspired a bunch of people, and might find its own niche, but it is a flavor of the week kind of thing. I've been getting a lot more cold-calls by non-technical people in the last few weeks thanks to it. Congratulations, the quality threshold that justifies my response rose in equal measure. Nothing was gained, just a lot of tokens spent.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#629

Post by twelve40 »

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

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

if people are still using it, then it's really one of the few things, right?

* you are wrong and it's not awful

* it _is_ awful but good enough for normal people to never care about alternatives, which are anyway not even very easy to find given the absolute stranglehold google has on that slice

either way not quite the same as choice of llms today.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#630

Post by judahmeek »

nfm wrote: post #603
parliament32 wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Google Search was head & shoulders better than the alternatives back when Google was developing into the behemoth it is today.

Google search still has a ton of stickiness for the casual user.

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