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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

>ChatGPT is by far the dominant prosumer product

Some people prefer to delude themselves in order to not admit this.

Just yesterday [1], I argued ChatGPT was a strong brand just to be downvoted to the bottom. Lol. Imagine being so blatantly wrong at something you are supposedly a specialist at.

Turns out it's only a 3BnUSD / year brand, two years after its inception. Also, who is "Claude"? [2].

In terms of tech, nothing even comes close to "GPT-4o mini" for the same price/performance.

OpenAI will continue to dominate the market for the next decade, at least.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41723208

2: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&geo=...

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OpenAI's weird contract with Microsoft, whereby Microsoft has rights to their IP/artifacts up until OpenAI's board unilaterally declares they have achieved "AGI" (meaning whatever they choose it to mean), may come back to haunt them.

Microsoft is living with the possibility of OpenAI cutting them off at any time of their choosing, as well as not being in control of a technology which is becoming increasingly important, and they are feeling it. Microsoft is trying to build their own SOTA model internally, and there is every reason to expect they will succeed - they have the GPUs, money, desire, paranoia and talent required to do it, and as we have seen from many players there is no moat.

So, what happens to OpenAI when (not if), Microsoft end their relationship? How do OpenAI sell their product, other than directly, to what extent does it cut them off from enterprise customers, can they financially handle building their own $100B datacenters if they are forced to?

>So, what happens to OpenAI when (not if), Microsoft end their relationship?

I don't know, but @sama should know (and most likely he does).

I'm not his fan. But am a fan of reality and that's what it is.

It's also not like "some guy" suddenly has to build $100B datacenters and whoops that's an issue. This is a 150BnUSD company, with millions of users and a brand that's recognized worldwide, they have plenty of options to choose from.

> It's also not like "some guy" suddenly has to build $100B datacenters and whoops that's an issue.

I'm sure they could raise $100B if/when they need to, as long as the growth/scaling story stays intact, but $100B is still a lot. They just raised $6B, which alongside a similar amount raised by x.ai is largest raise by a startup afaik. Buying 100K GPUs atm would be a challenge too, due to supply.

In the meantime, per Dwarkesh interview with SemiAnalysis.com Dylan, Microsoft is in process of fiber-connecting multiple datacenters to make a massive meta-cluster, and this is what OpenAI would lose access to if the relationship with Microsoft sours. Amazon (partnered with Anthropic) and Meta, even x.ai, already have massive clusters, so OpenAI could find themselves temporarily in the GPU-poor club if they upset Microsoft after Microsoft make them expendable (or maybe at that point, it's "will" rather than "could").

Pretty sure that deal is out, seeing as they did away with their "non-profit" overseeing their weird-capped-profit stuff. No-one but their lawyers probably knows for sure, tho...

>Microsoft is living with the possibility of OpenAI cutting them off at any time of their choosing

There is a partnership that benefits both parties, and the legal agreement is most certainly more complicated than you're describing.

No doubt, but nonetheless MSFT is trying to replace them as fast as possible.

You seem more focused in being "right" about votes (in this comment, in the other comment, in your profile comment...) than actually engaging the conversations themselves. [1] is about whether they have a strong moat, that's orthogonal to whether those people thought ChatGPT was the dominant product.

I'd agree being the current best, having a lot of revenue, and being the popular origin of generic terms like "GPT" are indeed great examples of being dominant though. Having "a strong moat" means having reasons 5 other companies won't be able to do the same thing in the next 5-10 years and overtake them. History has shown, plenty of times, just being the big brand OG player at the start doesn't provide a big moat in and of itself. If that were the case you'd be talking about how some other company like Google is the dominant player in all things AI right now.

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