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How will OpenAI compete?

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#631

Post by danesparza »

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?

Um. Google has already integrated Gemini into Chrome. I'm not sure what you mean by "OpenAI has plenty of time to have a Chrome moment". If you're just referring to the browser wars, the original wars were fought (furiously) between Microsoft, Mozilla, (and to a lesser extent Apple). Microsoft thought they had won, and then Chrome came out.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#632

Post by spaceprison »

daxfohl wrote: post #130

I just wonder how long it'll take local models to be good enough for 99% of use cases. It seems like it has to happen sooner or later. My hunch is that in five years we'll look back and see current OpenAI as something like a 1970's VAX system. Once PCs could do most of what they could, nobody wanted a VAX anymore. I have a hard time imagining that all the big players today will survive that shift. (And if that partic…

My conspiracy theory is oai saw the writing on the wall and the massive gpu commit was in part to starve the market to delay this inevitability.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#633

Post by array_key_first »

graemep wrote: post #457
DrScientist wrote: post #454

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…

It have worked for Google for years, and that was without even the barrier of download in app, just going to a different URL.

All of googles products are unique in some way and have genuine moats. The search engine was the best. The ecosystem was there and pretty good. Docs had online collaboration. And on and on.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#634

Post by greggsy »

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 disagree. Are people really that attached to their conversations though?

Anecdotally, the vast majority of my own conversations and coding interactions are transient in nature, to the point where I prefer to use the ‘temporary’ mode in whatever tool I’m using.

For coding, every project needs a plan and readme to get whatever agent back up to speed with what the task is. Anyone with a paid-for GH Copilot license knows that you can just switch between whatever provider at a whim, depending on the needs of your task or financial requirements.

I think people will find it easier to revert back to Siri 2.0 if that ever materialises, in which case the stickiness moat is bridged by a more familiar and widely integrated abstraction layer.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#635

Post by cmsp12 »

flumpcakes wrote: post #332
Figs wrote: post #276

> The one place where OpenAI does have a clear lead today is in the user base: it has 8-900m users. There is no way that number is an accurate reflection of the number of actual human users of their service. I could believe they have 8-900m bot/fraud accounts in their databases, maybe, but not real users.

I suspect I am one of those 1bn users by their metric. I have an account, and I sometimes query it. I also query Claude and Gemini. I have zero loyalty, if I run out of tokens on one, I will just pick up the conversation on another provider. Perhaps I am using them wrong, but the amount of babysitting I have to do anyway, I don't find it that tedious to stay on the same topic during a swap. There's no way I would spe…

i used to use them that way until I got a IDE with AI and is way better for my development than copying and pasting into the chat. It can have the whole project as context,plan features with me, etc. I use it a lot in a way that I cant see why I would go to programming without it right now. It takes time to adjust to it to learn how it works and all but it's worth it

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#636

Post by dh2022 »

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 used to be awesome, heads, shoulders, belt buckle and knees above everyone else.

Seriously, I still remember the moment I first used Google. I was using Altavista / OpenText and Yahoo now and then. I thought Altavista was the best and OpenText was for geeking out. Once I tried Google I never looked back for decades. Their tech was their moat.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#637

Post by joefourier »

reducesuffering wrote: post #618
joefourier wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ASI still runs at finite speed and is limited by its hardware, and speed of its interactions with the real world. It won’t be able to recursively improve itself overnight if it only generates 10 tokens per seconds, and a second company could very well train one of its own before the first one has time to do much.

You're not thinking of the second order meta system here. ASI isn't just one instance of an LLM responding to you in a session. It's the datacenter full of millions of LLM interacting with millions in parallel.

Well in that case wouldn't that be millions of ASIs, each with contradictory goals?

I'm not saying that ASI isn't an existential threat, just that it probably won't present itself like the fanciful sci-fi scenario of a singular intelligence suddenly crossing a magic threshold and being able to take over the world. Most likely it will be some scenario we won't have predicted, the same way hardly anybody predicted LLMs.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#638

Post by parliament32 »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #407
sigmoid10 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end. Don't underestimate advertising. Noone pays for Facebook or Google search. Yet the ad business with a couple billion users seems profitable enough to fund frontier LLM research and inference infrastructure as a side-gig in these companies. Google only rushed out AI overview because they saw ChatGPT eating their market share in information retri…

> Don't underestimate advertising. OpenAI is talking out of their ass with their advertising plans. Meta and Google are an advertising duopoly, extremely anti-competitive, and basically defrauding their own customers. OpenAI can't just replicate that. Worse still is that OpenAI has no competitive edge. All the hype around their advertising plans is based on the idea that they can blend the ads right into the response…

> This is explicitly illegal.

Is it really any different than product placement in TV shows/movies?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#639

Post by parliament32 »

brookst wrote: post #149
keyle wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just like it would take 10 seconds to buy her a Pepsi instead of her preferred Coke. Would you?

If you could move the taste with the ease of OpenAI's Export Data tool? Sure, why not?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#640

Post by danpalmer »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #19
danpalmer wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not surprising, Nvidia's margin was just a huge incentive for companies/countries to develop their own solutions. You don't have to be 100% as good if you're 80% cheaper. It's unsurprising that this is being driven by Chinese companies/labs who often have a lot less funding than the US, and the big tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) who will benefit the most from having their own compute. I've never believed…

It seems like it’s really only China that’s pursuing the route of doing more with smaller/cheaper models, too, which also has a lot of potential to give the whole bubble a good shake. To me it seems like the most obvious thing to do. More efficient models both make up for whatever you lost by using cheaper hardware and let you do more with the hardware you have than the competition can. By comparison the ever-growing…

I think you might be underestimating the use of small models in proprietary systems. The progress from China is very visible because it's very open, but the big tech companies are doing this too for cost savings.
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