[jstummbillig]

There is some serious confusion about the strength of OpenAIs position.

"chatgpt" is a verb. People have no idea what claude or gemini are, and they will not be interested in it, unless something absolutely fantastic happens. Being a little better will do absolutely nothing to convince normal people to change product (the little moat that ChatGPT has simply by virtue of chat history is probably enough from a convenience standpoint, add memories and no super obvious path to export/import either and you are done here).

All that OpenAI would have to do, to easily be worth their evaluation eventually, is to optimize and not become offensively bad to their, what, 500 million active users. And, if we assume the current paradigm that everyone is working with is here to stay, why would they? Instead of leading (as they have done so far, for the most part) they can at any point simply do what others have resorted to successfully and copy with a slight delay. People won't care.

[aeyes]

Google has a text input box on google.com, as soon as this gives similar responses there is no need for the average user to use ChatGPT anymore.

I already see lots of normal people share screenshots of the AI Overview responses.

[jstummbillig]

You are skipping over the part where you need to bring normal people, specially young normal people, back to google.com for them to see anything at all on google.com. Hundreds of millions of them don't go there anymore.

[HDThoreaun]

Is there evidence of this? Googles earnings are as strong as ever.

[wahnfrieden]

that's adsense

[paxys]

> as soon as this gives similar responses

And when is that going to be? Google clearly has the ability to convert google.com into a ChatGPT clone today if they wanted to. They already have a state of the art model. They have a dozen different AI assistants that no one uses. They have a pointless AI summary on top of search results that returns garbage data 99% of the time. It's been 3+ years and it is clear now that the company is simply too scared to rock the boat and disrupt its search revenue. There is zero appetite for risk, and soon it'll be too late to act.

[askafriend]

As the other poster mentioned, young people are not going there. What happens when they grow up?

[candiddevmike]

ChatGPT is going to be Kleenex'd. They wasted their first mover advantage. Replace ChatGPT's interface with any other LLM and most users won't be able to tell the difference.

[ComplexSystems]

"People have no idea what claude or gemini are"

One well-placed ad campaign could easily change all that. Doesn't hurt that Google can bundle Gemini into Android.

[jstummbillig]

If it were that simple to sway markets through marketing, we would see Pepsi/Coca-Cola or McDonalds/BurgerKing swing like crazy all the time from "one well-placed ad campaign" to the next. We do not.

[ComplexSystems]

Thanks to well-placed ad campaigns, people have a very good idea what Pepsi, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Burger King are. They also know what Siri is. And it would be similarly easy to establish Gemini as a household name.

[chollida1]

Chatgpt has no moat of any kind though.

I can switch tomorrow to use gemini or grok or any other llm, and I have, with zero switching cost.

That means one stumble on the next foundational model and their market share drops in half in like 2 months.

Now the same is true for the other llms as well.

[potatolicious]

I think this pretty substantially overstates ChatGPT's stickiness. Just because something is widely (if not universally) known doesn't mean it's universally used, or that such usage is sticky.

For example, I had occasion to chat with a relative who's still in high school recently, and was curious what the situation was in their classrooms re: AI.

tl;dr: LLM use is basically universal, but ChatGPT is not the favored tool. The favored tools are LLMs/apps specifically marketed as study/homework aids.

It seems like the market is fine with seeking specific LLMs for specific kinds of tasks, as opposed to some omni-LLM one-stop-shop that does everything. The market has already and rapidly moved beyond from ChatGPT.

Not to mention I am willing to bet that Gemini has radically more usage than OpenAI's models simply by virtue of being plugged into Google Search. There are distribution effects, I just don't think OpenAI has the strongest position!

I think OpenAI has some first-mover advantage, I just don't think it's anywhere near as durable (nor as large) as you're making it out to be.

[lizardking]

Xerox was a verb too