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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

> They do make OpenAI look like kids in that regard.

Nokia and Blackberry had far more phone-making experience than Apple when the iPhone launched.

But if you can't bring that experience to bear, allowing you to make a better product - then you don't have a better product.

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The thing is that OpenAI doesn't have an "iPhone of AI" so far. That's not to say what will happen in the future - the advent of generative AI may become a big "equalizer" in the tech space - but no company seems to have a strong edge that'd make me more confident in any one of them over others.

OpenAI has all of the people using ChatGPT.

A big advantage if this was a product with strong network externalities like social media networks, or even somewhat mobile phones with platform-biased communication tools.

But I don't see generative AI as being particularly that way.

Training data. Use begats feedback begats improvement.

GenAI does not have network effects, correct. There was a time last year when consumer search was still on the table, and I can see how MSFT winning share there might have conferred network effects for genAI, but it didn't happen. Now it's all about the enterprise, which is to say isolated data, which pretty much rules out network effects.

Phones are an end-consumer product. AI is not only an end-consumer product (and probably not even mostly an end-consumer one). It is a tool to be used in many different steps in production. AI is not chatbots.

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