[treis]

ChatGPT is synonymous with non technical/work related LLMs. They're amassing a ton of user history. That history improves the product for the user because it has more context into the person. They can feed it back into model improvements and for advertising.

You can see a future where a user types in "plan a vacation for me" and ChatGPT coordinates everything from there. Those sorts of users aren't going to switch because model X is 10% cheaper or better.

[drob518]

I see a future where lots of models can plan a vacation for me, not just ChatGPT. Saying that there is brand equity in the ChatGPT brand feels a lot like saying there’s a brand equity in the MySpace and AOL 25 years ago. Google in particular, via Android and its relationship with Apple to power Siri, has a much better shot at grabbing the “plan a vacation for me” consumer market, IMO.

I could easily see OpenAI become irrelevant in 2 years if they stumble at all and don’t keep up with the other frontier models.

[delecti]

There's a lot of value in having your product's name be synonymous with the product category.

Google's quality has gone to shit, but internet searching is still "googling", both in verbiage and in the actual service people use. It's not an impenetrable moat, but OpenAI would have to stumble pretty hard to lose all of that edge.

[drob518]

I agree that there’s huge value in being the generic category name (see Kleenex). That said, Google and Apple are going to roll this into every phone and tablet and laptop/Chromebook. Yea, OpenAI can release a phone app (already have), but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the Google and Apple integrations will be superior, and even if the EU or somebody forces them to create an “AI provider neutral API” like they have for web search in browsers, most people will just roll with the default like they do for Google Search. You might be allowed to choose OpenAI, but most normies won’t.

[treis]

They won't have the years of chat history to customize the vacation.