Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs of fraying

Does OpenAI have any fundamental advantage beyond brand recognition?

The ChatGPT site crossed 3B visits last month (For perspective - https://imgur.com/a/hqE7jia). It has been >2B since May this year and >1.5B since March 2023. The Summer slump of last year ? Completely gone.

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...

> The ChatGPT site crossed 3B visits last month

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.

>With how much profit per visit though?

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.