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They also have brand recognition, for what it’s worth. Every non-engineer in the world practically thinks AI == ChatGPT.

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Sure that helps with the consumer market, but most people will use AI integrated into other products and not directly.

Those integrated AI solutions will usually be done via enterprise deals where brand name is not quite as important. It will be done by people who care about cost, reliability and ease of use.

Think of nginx's dominance in web servers even though it has no name recognition among the general population. Or Stripe's payment system.

Yes, however it's increasingly likely that the GPT in ChatGPT will not be limited to OpenAI (in the US), so I'm not sure how much ChatGPT will be worth with countless other platforms containing GPT in their names.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/no-gpt-trademark-for-opena...

The thing is that there is almost no lock in in the models. So brand recognition doesn't help much as people look into the benchmarks and price sometime in the future, if not when just starting out.

Meh, I don't think it's worth much. In a few years that'll be like claiming that so-and-so had name brand recognition for transistors. Most people don't need to care who manufactures their transistors.

Unless your market is direct to end user, end user brand name recognition doesn't matter. In the case of AI, at least so far, the primarily income won't be from end-users directly, but rather via enterprise integrations into existing tools that already have end user market share (e.g. Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows, VS Code, Notion, etc.)

It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Most people don’t know that TSMC exists, or what Microsoft does beyond Windows and Xbox (which are a small fraction of its business).

Correct, I didn't say it's a bad thing. I said it's not clear that it's a good thing (i.e. an asset)

Most people don't need to care who manufactures their transistors.

They might, in an upside-down world where the Shockley Semiconductor board tried to fire Shockley, and where the Traitorous Eight not only didn't bail out but took his side.

Brands can change quickly, but they do matter in the short term. I've witnessed customer support teams use Firefox to say they only supported Internet Explorer and government ministers who thought it was "good" that IE was the "only" web browser, and weirdly a phone company whose customer support person thought their SIM cards worked better on Android than iPhone and that their web chat wouldn't work with a Mac even though they were talking to me on a Mac at the time.

And when I was a kid, it seemed like all the teachers thought it would be a waste of time to learn MacOS because "Apple would be bankrupt soon". (Given how much all the app UIs changed, right decision for the wrong reason).

All of these examples are end-products. "AI" itself will not be. The winner in AI will be whoever permeates other products/brands most successfully, and end-user brand familiarity doesn't matter much for that. Familiarity among engineering and product leaders is what matters.

Indeed, I'm not disagreeing on that, merely opining that "ChatGPT" as a name could well be relevant for a bit.

Maybe, but maybe AI will become front and center of consumer and productivity IT products and their premier brand ambassadors will be anthropomorphized AI agents. Hello Clippy, this time for real.

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