[mandeepj]

> If your product becomes commoditized

Depends on the product - whether protein bars, salty chips, cellular service, or IPhone or something else. If your product has a flavor, it’s never going to get commoditized. Coke still tastes better than Pepsi.

[collingreen]

This is the power of a brand. Kirkland and some private label products are literally the same as the competitor products and yet are perceived differently. Even in your Pepsi vs Coke example, Pepsi routinely wins in blind taste tests but there are more "Coke people".

It will be interesting to see if the LLM companies can establish their own "brand" and how they will do that. LLM voice is a thing but not sure if it's a good thing people will use to hang their self identity on. Distillation of models and constant training also make this complicated. Claude code is winning on harness and ux right now but it seems precarious and also easy to commoditize. I think elon tried to add branding to his chatbot pretty intelligently by being iconically crude/evil/"anti woke" since it's both highly visible and less likely to be copied.

We live in fascinating times!