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by krick 521 days ago
To be fair, OpenAI's products are not really models, they are... products. So it's debatable if they really do have anything special.

I don't really think they do, because to me it seemed pretty much since GPT-1, that having callbacks to run python and query google, having "inner dialog" before summarizing an answer and a dozen more simple improvements like this are quite obvious things to do, that nobody just actually implemented (yet). And if some of them are not obvious per se, they are pretty obvious in the hindsight. But, yeah, it's debatable.

I must admit though, that I doubt that this obvious weakness is not obvious to the stakeholders. I have no idea what the plan is, maybe what they gonna have that Anthropic doesn't is gonna be a nuclear reactor. Like, honestly, all we are pretending to be forward-thinking analysts here, but in reality I couldn't figure out that Musk's "investment" into Twitter is literally politics at the time of it happening. Even though I was sure there is some plan, I couldn't say what it is, and I don't remember anybody in these threads expressing clearly enough what is quite obvious in the hindsight. Neither did all these people like Matt Levine, who are actually paid for their shitposting: I mostly remember them making fun of Musk "doing stupid stuff and finding out" and calling it a "toy".

2 comments

What product? A chat window? I'm not trying to be rude btw, but if the product isn't the LLM itself, that's all they have.
I regularly use several features within ChatGPT that are well beyond a chat window. Advanced Voice, DALL-E integration, Projects, and GPTs (mostly a couple private ones I created for my own use). There are other features that I don't use, like Canvas. Perhaps the sum of these still isn't an impressive product in your eyes, but it's surely more than just a chat window.
Interesting, so apparently UI and UX and responsiveness and polish all don’t matter for products? We can just ship shittily drawn interfaces now?
They aren’t that good. It’s mostly well rounded now, but on nacOS it’s often impossible to select parts of code sections.
That’s not just on macOS, and I’m pretty sure that’s a deliberate dark pattern to prevent users from taking their query to claude or gemini after gpt shits the bed.
> To be fair, OpenAI's products are not really models, they are... products

What's the distinction? What kind of functionality do they offer that other models don't?

A model is an ingredient in an AI product. The product includes the UI, tools / RAG, apps on various platforms, system prompts and personality, and so on.

Lots of products have been successful without a technical moat. Facebook has network effects, Apple has UX (though silicon has become a technical advantage if not moat), Adobe has “everyone knows how to use these tools” switching costs, Google has brand synonymous with search.

Companies are betting that models will be commodities but AI products will be sticky.

ChatGPT.com does much more than for example Llama3.2-vision. It can search the web automatically, write code and run it just to answer you, much more agency.