[mushufasa]

Userbase and customer relationships are valuable. If someone else creates GPT5, but doesn't have a large user base, then OpenAI the company could buy that invention. Or, as we saw with deepseek in January, fast-follow with a comparable model within a reasonable amount of time.

Brands have value. If someone has logged into ChatGPT for two years daily, they have built a habit. That habit certainly can be disrupted, but there's a level of inertia and barrier -- something else has to be 10x better and not just 2x better.

When DeepSeek came out, I tried it out but didn't fundamentally switch my habit. OpenAI + Claude + Gemini instead caught up.

[danpalmer]

> Userbase and customer relationships are valuable

Which of these does Jony Ive's company have?

[srik]

The comment also includes brand value in the next paragraph and Jony has loads of that.

[danpalmer]

Does io have any brand value?

They're not acquiring Jony or Jony's design firm. They're acquiring the remaining portion of a joint venture. You could even say that LoveFrom is divesting from the joint venture.

[hansworst]

Following that logic, they’ll have to keep spending quite a bit to get to the user base of the current hyperscalers, some of which are already ahead of OpenAI in terms of LLM performance.

[kaliqt]

OpenAI would not be able to as every other company and governments even will make bids and OpenAI is not well loved to get favor to tilt the scale back in their direction.