Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeven7 | Hacker News Reader

Google themselves said there was no moat. Sam and whoever he recruits can do this again with funding. And that part should be easy. The closest thing OpenAI has to a moat was an inspirational public face. Now that they got rid of that, what do they have?

View on HN

That's right, what does OpenAI have now?

A comparatively massive user base, an app deployed onto many phones, accounts, the cutting edge AI models, the data, contracts for exclusive data access, compute contracts worth billions at a time when GPU compute is getting seriously scarce, corporate GTM partnerships from Bain to morgan stanley to Duolingo, a powerful brand (ChatGPT), tens of thousands of apps already built on their APIs, benefits from Government Lobbying

Ya, so really, what do they have, it sounds like they are basically dead.

They gained most of what matters within the last year. Someone else can too.

Anthropic is this alternative case with even more funding. How’s that working out for them?

They gained what they had in a blue ocean. Their competitor is going to swim in a red ocean. Playing catch up with technology that may go self improving.

Microsoft signed a contract that reads like a Kickstarter project ("would be wise to view any investment as a donation") because of what OpenAI had.

Imo the brand is the most meaningful piece here. To many people ChatGPT is AI. Even if LLM's continue to be commodified, the brand recognition will probably give them a lead until someone else can do something fundamentally new and exciting with the technology.

Still the best product/experience out there across the publicly available products. Bard is no GPT4, still, to this date.

> > OpenAI has to a moat was an inspirational public face. Now that they got rid of that, what do they have?

ChatGPT is a brand that has almost become as powerful as Google is for Alphabet and what Windows is for Microsoft and the 'i' prefix for Apple.

It's gonna be really hard to get people as excited about AI as ChatGPT because you need a similar combo of technical leap + penetration in pop culture, in order to get everybody.

Basically the same concept that is not well understood by that dude who changed twitter name because he bought a one letter domain back in the 1980s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com