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How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

661–670 of 693 posts

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#661

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…

But also a billion users is ChatGPT's biggest weakness. So many free users burning compute up. So many incentives to nerf the intelligence to affordable levels. Sounds like a nightmare.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is discount really an ad? Like if I had already made a decision to buy a thing and now I paid less for it was it really a working ad? Also sponsored content is way different than having ads on a website or in an app or what kind of ads do you think GPT will have? And you are definitely judging me. When people say “ads” that is pretty specific thing that they mean. If you broaden it to mean everything then I can’t arg…

> Is discount really an ad? In most cases, yes. At minimum, it’s a marketing tactic built with the same intent as an ad: to influence your decision-making. > Also sponsored content is way different than having ads on a website or in an app However they are all exactly the same, in that they are all ads. > When people say “ads” that is pretty specific thing that they mean. No, that’s what you mean. Most people aren’t…

Okay, so everything is an ad so there is no point in this.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most potential customers wouldn't ever think in terms as "justifying" a €20 purchase when the product is great. ChatGPT (and competitors) is an incredibly high value tool, and €20 per month is nothing for somebody who wants or needs it. It's just a matter of if they use it enough to start hitting the daily limits.

This is why people are constantly moaning about paying too many subscriptions and why we have companies whose whole business is to remind you to not pay for stupid subscriptions.

As if paying constantly for a thing is normal and not dystopian

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#664
post #647
post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've checked now, I don't see any selector anywhere in the app or settings. It all looks the usual way and the quality of translation hasn't changed.

Perhaps you are not in the country where this has been rolled out? https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/g...

Seems so, it's only in U.S., Mexico, and India for now.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current requirements are more org-scale, more payoff from scale, more moat. What moat? None of the AI providers have a moat at the moment, and the trend doesn't indicate that any of them will in the near future.

I made 2 posts in this thread regarding why I think they have a moat. Was there anything ambiguous or that you disagreed with?

> I made 2 posts in this thread regarding why I think they have a moat. Was there anything ambiguous or that you disagreed with?

I'm afraid I don't see those posts; I see 2x posts from you asserting they have a moat, but not why you think they have a moat.

I distinguish between "They have a moat." and "This is why $FOO, $BAR and $BAZ forms a moat."

Maybe you think brand recognition is a moat, but that didn't work out for incumbents before (too many examples to list).

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#666
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?

Google was better, but I'd argue that, say after 2014 or so, for the vast majority of my searches there was no real difference with Bing, and in some areas Bing was better (e.g. some aerial imagery in maps). Bing still never made a considerable dent in Google's market. I can easily see ChatGPT being a similar story.

You are forgetting all the money Google pays to be the default search engine in every browser.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#667
post #451
post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM owned literally the whole market on computers at a time when computing equipment was prohibitively expensive and centralised.

IBM was a special case, I'm not sure there were many markets so thoroughly cornered like IT was for about 3 decades. I guess telephone (AT&T) was similar.

I think there's similarity to the dynamic too. Not many instances have the means at this time to produce LLMs from scratch and operate them at scale.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#668
In consumer search, Google paid to be the default because defaults are basically behavioral gravity. Most people don’t churn defaults. In AI, the equivalent isn’t just “the search box,” it’s the assistant that sits inside the apps where you already spend your cognitive budget—design, docs, email, IDE, CRM, ticketing, finance—so your prompts stop being little one-off spells and start being operations with permissions, audit trails, and repeatability.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#669
Think more like what Microsoft did by being everywhere enterprises already were: integrations, admin controls, compliance posture, procurement-friendly packaging. OpenAI doesn’t need to “invent all experiences” if it can be the default inference layer that’s easiest to buy, govern, and instrument inside large orgs—especially if it can show auditors a cleaner story than “random employees piping data into a consumer chatbot.” This is the less sexy but very real wedge: the assistant becomes a governed interface to computation.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people pay for ChatGPT than any other Consumer AI service by far, and when ads rollout, it won't matter that much.

“consumer” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, I’d be curious to know how it compares to overall AI usage (ie including professionals using it).

It's not. By consumer, I simply mean the respective apps, not API Usage. I'm not excluding "professionals" lol.
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