Does OpenAI have any fundamental advantage beyond brand recognition?
replies(15):
Now personally, I've left the ChatGPT world (meaning I don't pay for a subscription anymore) and have been using Claude from Anthropic much more often for the same tasks, it's been better than my experience with ChatGPT. I prefer Claude's style, Artifacts, etc.
Also been toying with local LLMs for tasks that I know don't require a multi-hundred billion parameters to solve.
We use Gemini flash in prod. The latency and cost is just unbeatable - our product uses llms for lots of simple tasks so we don’t need a frontier model.
I don't know if this is going to emerge as a monopoly, and likely won't, but for whatever reason, openai and anthropic have been several months ahead of everyone else for quite some time.
Segment Anything 2 is fantastic- but less mysterious because its open source. NotebookLM is amazing, but nobody is rushing to create benchmarks for it. AlphaFold is never going to be used by consumers like ChatGPT.
OpenAI is certainly competitive, but they also work overtime to hype everything they produce as "one step closer to the singularity" in a way that the others don't.
I’ve heard plenty of people call any chatbot “chat gpt” - it’s becoming a genericized household name.
ChatGPT is a mouthful. Even copilot rolls off the tongue easier though doesn’t have the mindshare obviously.
Generic gpt would be better but you end up saying gpt-style tool, which is worse.
Getting to market first is obviously worth something but even if you're bullish on their ability to get products out faster near term, Google's going to be breathing right down their neck.
They may have some regulatory advantages too, given that they're (sort of) not a part of a huge vertically integrated tech conglomerate (i.e. they may be able to get away with some stuff that Google could not).
The question really should be what if anything gives OpenAI an advantage over Anthropic, Google, Meta, or Amazon? There are at least four players intent on eating OpenAI's market share who already have models in the same ballpark as OpenAI. Is there any reason to suppose that OpenAI keeps the lead for long?
This is what happens when there's vibrant competition in a space. Each company is innovating and each company is trying to catch up to their competitors' innovations.
It's easy to limit your view to only the places where OpenAI leads, but that's not the whole picture.
Gemini and Character AI ? A few hundred million. Claude ? Doesn't even register. And the gap has only been increasing.
So, "just" brand recognition ? That feels like saying Google "just" has brand recognition over Bing.
https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-top...
Engineers would quit and start improving the competition. They're still a bit fragile, in my view.
Also Sergey Brin is back in there working on AI.
They aren't letting anyone external have access to their top end products either. Google invented transformers and kept the field stagnant for 5 years because they were afraid it would eat into their search monopoly.
Anthropic takes safety to mean "let's not teach people how to build thermite bombs, engineer grey goo nanobots, or genome-targeted viruses", which is the traditional futurist concern with AI safety.
OpenAI and Google safety teams are far more concerned with revising history, protecting egos, and coddling the precious feelings of their users. As long as no fee-fees are hurt, it's full speed ahead to paperclip maximization.
Google and Meta aren't exactly lacking in conversation data: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Google Talk, Google Groups, Google Plus, Blogspot comments, Youtube Transcripts, &tc. The breadth and and breadth of data those 2 companies are sitting on that goes back for years is mind boggling.
[1]: https://www.tanayj.com/p/openai-and-anthropic-revenue-breakd...
The combination of the latest models in products that people want to use is what will drive growth.
The vast majority of people using LLMs just use ChatGPT directly. Anthropic is doing fine for technical or business customers looking to offer LLM services in a wrapper but that doesn't mean they register in the public consciousness.
If there's an actual business to be found in all this, that's where it's going to be.
The consumer side of this bleeds cash currently and I'm deeply skeptical of enough of the public being convinced to pay subscription fees high enough to cover running costs.
OpenAI can become a bigger advertising company than Google.
When people ask questions like which product should I buy, ChatGpt can recommend products from companies who are willing to give money to it to have their products recommended by AI.
With how much profit per visit though?
I just used ChatGPT and 2 other similar services for some personal queries. I copy-pasted the same query in all 3 of them, using their free accounts, just in case one answer looks better than the others. I got into this habit because of the latency: in the time it takes for the first service to answer, I've had time to send the query to 2 others, which makes it easier to ignore the first response if it's not satisfying. Usually it's pretty much the same though. We can nitpick about benchmarks, but I'm not sure they're that relevant for most users anyway. It doesn't matter much to me whether something is wrong 10 or 20% of the time, in both cases I can only send queries for which I can easily check that the answer makes sense.
I see other comments mentioning they stopped their ChatGPT Plus subscription because the free versions work well enough. I've never paid myself and it doesn't look like I ever will, because things keep getting better for free anyway. My default workflow is already to prompt several LLMs so one could go down, I wouldn't even notice. I'm sure I'm an outlier with this, but still, people might use Perplexity for their searches, some WhatsApp LLM chatbot for their therapy session, purely based on convenience. There's no lock-in whatsoever into a particular LLM chat interface, and the 3B monthly visits don't seem to make ChatGPT better than its competitors.
And of course as soon as they'll add ads, product placement, latency or any other limitation their competitor doesn't have, I'll stop using them, and keep on using the other N instead. At this point it feels like they need Microsoft more than Microsoft needs them.
I can’t shake the thought that meta played an integral role in the open-source nature of the LLM movement. Am I wrong, I can’t help but think I’m missing something.
They probably lose on each one, but it's the same with their competitors.
FWIW, regular folks now say "let me ask Chat" for what it used to be "let me Google that"; that is a huge cultural shift, and it happened in only a couple years.
This broken record is still going at it, going at it, going at it, ...
And yet, ChatGPT is number one, by a far margin; where's all of this "people could switch in a day if they wanted"?
Sure, you could comment on Digg, but it was a pain and not good for conversations, and that meant there was less to keep people around when it seemed like the company was started to put their finger on the scales for URL-submissions.
I will write it explicitly for you once again:
The plan is to make inference so cheap it's negligible.
No one thinks about the cost of a db query any more, but I'm sure people did back in the day (well, I suppose with cloud stuff, now people do need to think about it again haha)
I have literally never heard that from anyone, and most everyone I know is “regular folk”.
I work in (large scale) construction, and no one has ever said anything even remotely similar. None of my non-technical or technical business contacts.
I’m not saying you haven’t, and that your in-group doesn’t, just that it’s not quite the cultural phenomenon you’re suggesting.
Reddit had subreddits long before the migration. Reddit was a not very used site that had all the features.
It was Digg that made the decisions to force people off of it, not anything reddit did outside of having a space available that worked.
Reddit did not win due to it's features, it won because Digg said it doesn't matter what the users think, we will redesign the site and change how it works regardless of the majority telling us they don't want it.
Unlike the hyperscalers (i.e. cloud providers), Meta has a use for these themselves for inference to run their business on.
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If you kill ChatGPT, users will be on Claude in about three seconds.
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If you kill ChatGPT, users will be on Claude in about three seconds.
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I can't use the OpenAI app anyway as they demand a logged-in Google account. I do have play services but not logged in.
It boggles my mind why they want to insist that you make an account with their total competition in order to use their service but they do.