How will OpenAI compete? • Hacker News Board

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#91

Post by randerson » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 4:42 AM UTC

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…

In theory you can export your data from ChatGPT under Settings > Data Controls. In practice, I tried this recently and the download link was broken. Convenient bug I must say.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#92

Post by consumer451 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 4:42 AM UTC

https://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

I would love to dunk on this or something, but the lesson is that it's all about distribution.

Sama is really good at that, and also.. gotta give props for a lot of forward thinking like the orb, which now makes a lot of sense to me, as non-Apple/Google proof of personhood.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#93

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 4:43 AM UTC

ziznznzb wrote: post #66

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.

How do you know all your conversations are in there? Honest question I have this issue a lot with AI claims. Nobody verifies the output.

[deleted]

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#94

Post by simonw » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 4:45 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #83

simonw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think it's hilarious that a product name as awful as "ChatGPT" has become so ubiquitous. I wonder what percentage of its users know what the GPT stands for, or even thought about it for a second?

I mean, how is it any worse than 'google'? chatgpt is generic (as in, no prior meaning attached, except for the few people in the world who understand what GPT stands for). It's simple - even a non-english speaker can say it easily, and doesn't require one to be native to know how to pronounce it (this is a difficult concept for a native english speaker to grok). These features makes for a good name.

"Google" at least doesn't have an acronym for "Generative pre-trained transformer" baked into it.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#95

Post by atomicnumber3 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 4:51 AM UTC

keyle wrote: post #70

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…

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.

Idk, habit and the devil you know are powerful as hell. Google has enshittified search nearly beyond imagination, but it's still where the vastly overwhelming majority of people search.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#96

Post by daxfohl » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 4:52 AM UTC

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…

Yahoo, altavista, askjeeves, Google

Friendster, MySpace, Facebook

Netscape, ie, chrome

Icq, aim, MSN messenger, a million other chat apps

First mover advantage doesn't last long

Very high chance that the winner in five years is a company that does not yet exist

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#97

Post by benedictevans » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 4:52 AM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #9

This article is significantly better written than most anti-OpenAI/AI articles, and for that I am really grateful. I am generally an AI booster (lol), so I am happy to read well-considered thought pieces from people who disagree with me. That being said... > The one place where OpenAI does have a clear lead today is in the user base: it has 8-900m users. The trouble is, there’re only ‘weekly active’ users: the vast m…

You’ve missed the point completely - if the important experiences are things built on top of foundation models, where the model itself is just an API call, then you don’t need to have a foundation model for build them and the model is just commodity infra

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#98

Post by nick32661123 » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 4:53 AM UTC

energy123 wrote: post #87

sinenomine wrote: post #13

People underestimate the lead OAI has with their post-5.2 models. The author does not strike me as someone who closely follows the progress frontier labs make in US and around the world.

It's a joint ignorance of how these frontier models get baked and what consumers want. Many pundits think it's just a matter of scraping the internet and having a few ML scientists run ablation experiments to tune hyperparameters. That hasn't been true for over a year. The current requirements are more org-scale, more payoff from scale, more moat. The main legitimate competitive threat is adversarial distillation. Ma…

You pay to OpenAI or which one do you use? Do you switch regularly?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#99

Post by protocolture » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 4:53 AM UTC

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…

> The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue.

People used to suggest this about MySpace.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#100

Post by agentifysh » Thu, Feb 26, 2026, 4:53 AM UTC

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 in a position where the market cannot afford to have it implode. Basically, it wants to or it needs to be too big to fail. And I think we're already kind of seeing the politicization, if you will, sort of the rocket race between two superpowers or large powers on the AI front, and I think that Might be a viable strategy.