It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it • Hacker News Board

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#71

Post by bgwalter » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

Stratechery has always been shallow, but these overt advertisements are disturbing:

- Sneaking in how someone went from a Sora skeptic to a purported creator within a week.

- Calling the result the "future of creation".

- Titling the advertisement "It’s OpenAI’s World, We’re Just Living in It".

What they are doing here is to pitch Sora to attention deficit teenagers in order to have yet another way to make the hair of the favorite content creator red. As if that didn't already exist.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#72

Post by thiago_fm » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

The victory lap from Sam Altman and all the money being raised makes people forget the following:

- Open source LLM models at most 12 months behind ChatGPT/Gemini; - Gemini from Google is just as good, also much cheaper. For both Google and the users, as they make their own TPU; - Coding. OpenAI has nothing like Sonnet 4.5

They look like they invested billions to do research for competitors, which have already taken most of their lunch.

Now with the Sora 2 App, they are just burning more and more cash, so people watch those generated videos in Tiktok and Youtube.

I find it hilarious all the big talk. I hope I get proven wrong, but they seem to be getting wrecked by competitors.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#73

Post by kllrnohj » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

threetonesun wrote: post #56

kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

The play OpenAI is making has nothing to do with the underlying models any more. They release good ones but it doesn't really matter, they're going for being the place people land when they open a web browser. That is incredibly sticky and not easily replaced. Being the company that replaces the phrase "oh just Google it" is worth half the money in the world, and I think they're well on their way to getting there.

But that also makes them the product itself and requires standalone profitability which is not at all like the Windows' analogy being presented.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#74

Post by thiago_fm » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:35 PM UTC

wahnfrieden wrote: post #24

aaa_aaa wrote: post #17

Openai is an artificially and ridiculously inflated balloon. It has nothing except initial market capture with hype. But yes they will keep whipping investors and keep burning money.

They also have the leading model.

Which model? Sonnet 4.5 DESTROYS anything OpenAI has for coding.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#75

Post by kllrnohj » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:38 PM UTC

yubblegum wrote: post #41

kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

> Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driver model. I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS vendors (say Ora to Ingress) was also "an afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not…

> The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not 'universal' interfaces.

True, but that's not really applicable here since LLMs themselves are not stable, and are certainly not stable within a vendors own product line. Like imagine if every time Oracle shipped a new version it was significantly behaviorally inconsistent with the previous one. Upgrading within a vendor and switching vendors ends up being the same task. So you quickly solidify on either

1) never upgrading, although with these being cloud services that's not necessarily feasible, and since LLMs are far from a local maxima in quality that'd quickly leave your stack obsolete

or

2) being forced to be robust, which makes it easy to migrate to other vendors

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#76

Post by threetonesun » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:47 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #73

threetonesun wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The play OpenAI is making has nothing to do with the underlying models any more. They release good ones but it doesn't really matter, they're going for being the place people land when they open a web browser. That is incredibly sticky and not easily replaced. Being the company that replaces the phrase "oh just Google it" is worth half the money in the world, and I think they're well on their way to getting there.

But that also makes them the product itself and requires standalone profitability which is not at all like the Windows' analogy being presented.

I agree, in general. I don't know what the world looks like in 10 years if all of the weird attempts at fitting an LLM as a replacement to what we have currently actually works, however. Facebook is probably the closest analogy, where there's plenty of room to grow, but at some point you're going to have the OS builders shut down your efforts unless you want to build your own OS.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#77

Post by saghm » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:49 PM UTC

nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #14

tallowen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a different takeaway - that a lot of folks on here read Ben Thomson and respect his work! It sounds like Ben is pretty bullish on OpenAI and maybe he's convinced folks through his work to agree with this take.

I don't even know who "Ben" is...

I've seen articles from this blog over the years and every time there are a bunch of comments referring to the author on a first name basis. As far as I can tell he's a guy who posts a bunch of hot takes on finance/economics/markets/etc. and I guess is very well known to a core audience that might overestimate his name recognition to other people who might just be seeing something on the front page of Hacker News without recognizing the source.

There's nothing inherently wrong with comments referring to him with by his first name, but I don't think I've ever seen a similar pattern with any other sources here outside of maybe a few with much more universal name recognition. It's always struck me as a little bit odd, but not a big enough deal for me to go out of my way to comment about it before now.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#78

Post by roxolotl » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

irl_zebra wrote: post #51

I'm on the verge of unsubscribing from Stratechery. The last month has been a bunch of fawning over Meta, YouTube, and constant talk about and fawning over OpenAI and whatever latest models are coming out. It's kind of tiring and boring. I swear I heard them talk about some YouTube influencers event like five times across their different shows and across time. Like, I do not care at all.

Is this fawning or just reflecting reality? I’m generally in the “LLMs kinda suck camp” and I read the headline and thought “yep 100%”. OpenAI is able to raise and deploy insane amounts of capital on a whim. Regardless of that being a good or bad thing it’s still true.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#79

Post by pants2 » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

Much of the value I get from ChatGPT is based on it's memory system that has a good profile on me. For example if I ask it to find me something to eat at X restaurant, it will already know my allergies, dietary preferences, weight goals, medications, other foods I like, etc and suggest an item based on that, all workout me explicitly telling it.

Moving from ChatGPT to Claude I would lose a lot of this valuable history.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#80

Post by mooglevich » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 6:56 PM UTC

irl_zebra wrote: post #51

I'm on the verge of unsubscribing from Stratechery. The last month has been a bunch of fawning over Meta, YouTube, and constant talk about and fawning over OpenAI and whatever latest models are coming out. It's kind of tiring and boring. I swear I heard them talk about some YouTube influencers event like five times across their different shows and across time. Like, I do not care at all.

As a longtime loyal subscriber to Stratechery... I kinda agree. But as the other commenters did point out, this does reflect how the market seems to feel about OpenAI, at least. (Meta - I'm less sure of; Thompson does fawn over Meta quite a bit, I personally think it's too much and seems to not fully reflect reality, but man do they really cane it when you see their usage numbers, so maybe he's right.)

I did think his GPT-5 commentary was good, insofar as picking up the nuance of why it's actually better than the immediate reactions I, at least, saw in the headlines.

Where I do agree with you is how Stratechery's getting a little oversaturated. I'm happy Ben Thompson is building a mini media empire, but I might have liked it more when it was just a simple newsletter that I got in my inbox, rather than pods, YouTube videos, and expanding to include other tech/news doyens. Maybe I'm just a tech media hipster lol.