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  shubhamjain
  Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue.My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. There are no network effects for sure, but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Understandable that it would be hard to get majority of these free users to pay for anything, and hence, advertising seems a good bet. You couldn't have thought of a more contextual way of plugging in a paid product.I think OpenAI has better chance to winning on the consumer side than everyone else. Of course, would that much up against hundreds of billions of dollars in capex remains to be seen.
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  ryanlitalien
  I speak native English and barebones high school Spanish. I recently visited Costa Rica and almost every time there was a language barrier issue (unknown word or phrase), the local folks opened ChatGPT, said what they were trying to say in Spanish and then had ChatGPT convert it to English. It was everywhere.
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  gradus_ad
  These very valid points apply to all companies trying to make money off of proprietary models, which means margins are going to collapse in a vicious price war that will make Uber vs Lyft seem tame.As margins collapse capex will collapse. Unfortunately valuations have become so tied to AI hype any reduction in capex will signal maybe the hype has gotten ahead of itself, meaning valuations have gotten ahead of themselves. So capex keeps escalating.None of this takes into account the hoarding effects at play with regards to GPU acquisition. It's really a dangerous situation the industry is caught in.
• throwaway13337
  These sorts of doom articles are interesting in that they are from the perspective of tech company valuations. Why is this the important perspective?For the humanity perspective, this doom is very optimistic. It says that these LLMs currently disrupting the platforms cannot themselves be the next platforms.Maybe no one will have 'the ability to make people do something that they don't want to do' sort of power this go round.Sounds good to me.
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  XCSme
  Same question for Atrophic.Personally I only see Google (Gemini), X (Grok) and the Chinese models having a chances to still be alive in 1-2 years.
• modeless
  > The models have a very large user base, but very narrow engagement and stickiness, and no network effect or any other winner-takes-all effect so far that provides a clear path to turning that user base into something broader and durable.I think this is clearly wrong. Users provide lots of data useful for making the models better and that is already being leveraged today. It seems like network effects are likely in the future too. And they have several ways to get stickiness including memory.
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  theptip
  I think this take underestimates a couple points:1) the opportunities for vertical integration are huge. Anthropic originally said they didn’t want to build IDEs, then realized the pivot to Claude Code was available to them. Likewise when one of these companies can gobble up Legal, Medical, etc why would they let companies like Harvey capture the margins?2) oss models are 6-12 months behind the frontier because of distillation. If labs close their models the gap will widen. Once vertical integration kicks off, the distillation cost becomes higher, and the benefit of opening up generic APIs becomes lower.I can imagine worlds where things don’t turn out this way, but I think folks are generally underrating the possibilities here.
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  rafaelmn
  I keep hearing about how the app integrations will be where the AI value is and then I see the actual app integrations and they are between useless and mildly helpful.From what I can see Anthropic's big bet is that they will solve computer use and be able to act as an autonomous agent. Not so sure how fast they will progress on that. OpenAI on the other hand - I have no idea what they are planning - all I'm reading is AI porn and ads.Google seems to be lackluster at executing with Gemini but they are in the best position to win this whole thing - they have so much data (index of the web, youtube, maps) and so many ways to capitalize on the models - it's honestly shocking how bad they are at creating/monetizing AI products.
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  com2kid
  Sometimes I like to imagine what this would be like if the technology had appeared 25 years ago.First off, nonetheless open publishing stuff. Everything would have been trade secrets.Next off no interoperable json apis instead binary APIs that are hard to integrate with and therefore sticky. Once you spent 3 or 4 months getting your MCP server setup, no way would you ever try to change to a different vendor!The number of investors was much smaller so odds are you wouldn't have seen these crazy high salaries and you wouldn't have people running off to different companies left and right. (I know, .com boom, but the .com boom never saw 500k cash salaries...)Imagine if Google hadn't published any papers about transformers or the attention paper had been an internal memo or heck just word2vec was only an internal library.It has all been a net good for technological progress but not that good for the companies involved.
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  sinenomine
  People underestimate the lead OAI has with their post-5.2 models. The author does not strike me as someone who closely follows the progress frontier labs make in US and around the world.
• Buttons840
  Tech companies are one of the jewels in America's (USA's) crown. If we build a bunch of huge AI companies, rivals will probably continue to release open AI models which undermine the US's influence in the world.
• anon
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  neom
  Not many folks talking about this: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...The WH has said it hasn't approved any sales, but it's not clear China is buying, and it seem they are making good progress on their huawei ascend chips. If China is basiclly at parity on the full stack (silicon, framework, training, model), and it starts open weighting frontier models at $0.xx/M tokens, then yeah, moat issues all around one would imagine? Not surprised to see Anthropic complaining like this: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist... - but I don't know how you go back from it at this point?
• re-thc
  Wasn't OpenAI's moat buying up all the RAM or Nvidia cards?
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  johnfn
  This article is significantly better written than most anti-OpenAI/AI articles, and for that I am really grateful. I am generally an AI booster (lol), so I am happy to read well-considered thought pieces from people who disagree with me.That being said...> The one place where OpenAI does have a clear lead today is in the user base: it has 8-900m users. The trouble is, there’re only ‘weekly active’ users: the vast majority even of people who already know what this is and know how to use it have not made it a daily habit. Only 5% of ChatGPT users are paying, and even US teens are much more likely to use this a few times a week or less than they are to use it multiple time a day.This really props up the whole argument, because the author goes on to say that OpenAI's users are not really engaged. But is "only" 5% of users paying of a 8-900M user base really so inconsequential? What percentage of Meta's users are paying? Google's? I would be curious to see the author dig deeper here, because I am skeptical that this is really as bad as the author suggests.Moving on to another section:> If the next step is those new experiences, who does that, and why would it be OpenAI? The entire tech industry is trying to invent the second step of generative AI experiences - how can you plan for it to be you? How do you compete with this chart - with every entrepreneur in Silicon Valley?Er, are any of these startups training foundation models? No? Then maybe that is how you compete? I suppose the author would say that the foundation model isn't doing much for OpenAI's engagement metrics (and therefore revenue), but I am not sure I agree there.Still, really good article. I think it really crystalizes the anti-OpenAI argument and it gives me a lot of interesting things to think about.
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  system2
  This is confirmation bias. HN and other tech people are focusing on the programming aspect of AI more than anything else. The average user does not use it for that, and they don't care. ChatGPT became something like Kleenex.
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  d--b
  Worth noting that it’s not a winner-takes all situation. There’s definitely space for differentiation.Anthropic is in favor with developers and generally tech people, while OpenAi / Gemini are more commonly used by regular folks. And Grok, well, you know…We have yet to see who’s winning in the “creative space”, probably OpenAI.As these positionings cristallize, each company is likely going to double down on their user’s communities, like Apple did when specifically targeting creative/artsy people, instead of cranking general models that aren’t significantly better at anything.
• anon
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• paradox_hash
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• boxingdog
  The main problem with OpenAI/Anthropic is that their only moat is their models, and it has been proven that you can clone a model through distillation. Although the performance is not exactly the same, it gets very close to the original.
• darig
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