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How will OpenAI compete?

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#71

Post by hattmall »

deepfriedbits wrote: post #27
com2kid wrote: post #17

Sometimes I like to imagine what this would be like if the technology had appeared 25 years ago. First off, nonetheless open publishing stuff. Everything would have been trade secrets. Next off no interoperable json apis instead binary APIs that are hard to integrate with and therefore sticky. Once you spent 3 or 4 months getting your MCP server setup, no way would you ever try to change to a different vendor! The nu…

Could they have even trained the models 25 years ago? Wikipedia was nothing close to what it is today and I know folks here like to mourn the fall of the open web, but it's still orders of magnitude larger today than it was in 2001. YouTube, so many information stores that simply didn't exist then.

Maybe not 25,but IBM Watson beat humans at Jeopardy over 10 years ago. The technology has been there, the difference is the willingness to burn money on it in hopes of capturing exponential revenue from disrupting industries.

Obviously the costs have come down but if IBM felt like burning 100 Billion in 2012 I'm pretty sure they could have a similarly impressive chat bot. Just not sure how they would have ever recouped the revenue.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#72

Post by thrwaway55 »

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…

Isn't half the appeal of AI that they can write a prompt like move all my text history from OpenAI to Claude and then they do it?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#73

Post by neya »

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…

OpenAI is already building complex user models. And I mean, super detailed user models - where you are from, what you do, what are your most vulnerable weaknesses, what you care about the most and everything else. This is information even the world's largest advertising company would struggle to put together across their fragmented eco-system (Gmail, Search, etc), but OpenAI has all this on a silver platter. And that scares me, because, a lot of people use ChatGPT as a therapist. We know this because of their advertising intent which they've explicitly expressed. Advertising requires good user models to work (so advertisers can efficiently target their audience) and it is the only way to prove ROI to the advertisers. "But, OpenAI said they won't do targeted ads..". Remember, Google said "Don't be evil" once upon a time too..

That's ok, we use ChatGPT only for coding. We should be good, right? Umm, no. They already explicitly expressed the intention to take a percentage of your revenue if you shipped something with ChatGPT, so even the tech guys aren't safe.

"As intelligence moves into scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge. Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created. That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path."

"Intelligence will follow the same path."

https://openai.com/index/a-business-that-scales-with-the-val...

So yes, OpenAI has the best chance to win on the consumer side than anyone else. But, that's not necessarily a good thing (and the OpenAI fanboys will hate me for pointing this out).

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#74

Post by anupshinde »

If you were forced to choose just one of all the competing players, which is "the one" you will use?

For me, the choice is ChatGPT, not for its Codex or other fancy tooling - just the chat. Not that Claude Code or Cowork is less important. Not that I like Codex over Claude Code.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#75

Post by chillfox »

hattmall wrote: post #58
goolz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of those people are paying? I think many say “use ChatGPT” to mean any LLM. As you noted it seems you just see ChatGPT in the wild but that is anecdotal. It is certainly pervasive right now. But I know a lot of people currently switching to Gemini. I personally prefer claude models for all my work. If I were them I would be very worried. They are never giving us AGI and I am skeptical they are worth .5 trill…

I'm very similar to the OP here, always hear about ChatGPT rarely anything else. Most people are definitely not paying, but of the few that are paying, outside of software developers, they are all paying for ChatGPT exclusively. I don't know of anyone paying for the basic chat versions of other AIs. A few developers paying for Claude and Gemini, but I know hundreds of people that talk of ChatGPT and no other AI, agai…

Outside of work I don't know anyone who pays for AI.

But I have noticed that everyone seems to be using ChatGPT as the generic term for AI. They will google something and then refer to the Gemini summary as "ChatGPT says...". I tried to find out what model/version one of my friends was using when he was talking about ChatGPT and it was "the free one that comes with Android"... So Gemini.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#76

Post by nozzlegear »

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…

Anecdata point: I canceled my ChatGPT pro subscription last year over some shitty thing Altman did at OpenAI and easily moved over to Claude. The only thing I took with me was the system prompt or whatever it's called, I couldn't care less about my conversation history. I'm planning to do the same thing with my Claude subscription if Anthropic kowtows to the Pentagon. These services are not sticky at all IMO.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#77

Post by bryanrasmussen »

bdangubic wrote: post #65
lll-o-lll wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. I just asked it to build me a searchable indexed downloaded version of all my conversations. One shot, one html page, everything exported (json files). I’m sure I could ask Claude to import it. I don’t see the moat.

there is no moat also because conversation history is useless. like saying “I cant move to DDG cause Google has my search history”

https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

it's not useless, although it used to be more useful than it is now.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#78

Post by arctic-true »

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.

When OpenAI starts requiring a payment, or showing an ad before it starts translating, will they continue? Or will they use the Google Translate app, which can do this locally? (Or for that matter Gemini or Grok or whatever?)

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#79

Post by paxys »

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…

Yup this is just another case of the HN bubble. I polled a bunch of non technical friends recently who I know use AI on a daily basis. Out of 10+ maybe 2 had ever heard of Claude, and no one had any interest in trying it.

ChapGPT has become the AI verb, and in the consumer space it is not getting dethroned.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#80

Post by casualscience »

gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #54
SecretDreams wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much is your wife paying for the privilege to use OAI presently?

This is the real question. Is she willing to pay $20 per month when Google's Gemini is free? Google can remain irrational longer than OAI can remain solvent.

Google's profits have been going up while 'giving away gemini for free', so I don't think they're 'being irrational', they're unit economics apparently work.
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