Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

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Agreed on the strategy questions. It's interesting to tie back to IBM; my first reaction was that openai has more consumer connectivity than IBM did in the desktop era, but I'm not sure that's true. I guess what is true is that IBM passed over the "IBM Compatible" -> "MS DOS Compatible" business quite quickly in the mid 80s; seemingly overnight we had the death of all minicomputer companies and the rise of PC desktop companies.

I agree that if you're sure you have a commodity product, then you should make sure you're in the driver seat with those that will pay more, and also try and grind less effective players out. (As a strategy assessment, not a moral one).

You could think of Apple under JLG and then being handed back to Jobs as precisely being two perspectives on the answer to "does Apple have a commodity product?" Gassée thought it did, and we had the era of Apple OEMs, system integrators, other boxes running Apple software, and Jobs thought it did not; essentially his first act was to kill those deals.

The new pricing tier suggests they're taking the Jobs approach - betting that their technology integration and reliability will justify premium positioning. But they face more intense commoditization pressure than either IBM or Apple did, given the rapid advancement of open-source models.

The critical question is timing - if they wait too long to establish their enterprise position, they risk being overtaken by commoditization as IBM was. Move too aggressively, and they might prematurely abandon advantages in the broader market, as Apple nearly did under Gassée.

Threading the needle. I don't envy their position here. Especially with Musk in the Trump administration.

It’s not just opensource. It’s also Claude, Meta and Google, of which the latter have real estate (social media and browser)

Yes and Anthropic, Google, Amazon are also facing commoditization pressure from open-source

Well one key difference is that Google and Amazon are cloud operators, they will still benefit from selling the compute that open source models run on.

The Apple partnership and iOS integration seems pretty damn big for them - that really corners a huge portion of the consumer market.

Agreed on enterprise - Microsoft would have to roll out policies and integration with their core products at a pace faster than they usually do (Azure AD for example still pales in comparison to legacy AD feature wise - I am continually amazed they do not priorities this more)

They don’t make any money from the Apple deal.

Except I had to sign in to OpenAI when setting up Apple Intelligence. Even though Apple Intelligence is doing almost nothing useful for me right now at least OpenAI’s AOI number's go up.

Right now Gemini Pro is best for email, docs, calendar integration.

That said ChatGPT Plus us a good product an I might spring for Pro for a month or two.

You don't have to sign into ChatGPT to use it with Siri.

Did you not sign in, and still get the occasional dialog box asking. “Ok to use ChatGPT?”

It'll send that anonymously. I think you only need to sign in if you want to continue the conversation on the web.

Non-paying user numbers are only good when selling, and who could afford to buy OpenAI?

ChatGPT through Siri/Apple Intelligence is a joke compared to using ChatGPT's iPhone app. Siri is still a dumb one trick pony after 13 years of being on the market.

Supposedly Apple wont be able to offer a Siri LLM that acts like ChatGPT's iPhone app until 2026. That gives Apple's current and new competitors a head start. Maybe ChatGPT and Microsoft could release an AI Phone. I'd drop Apple quickly if that becomes a reality.

For sure. If I were in charge of AI for the US, I'd prioritize having a known good and best-in-class LLM available not least for national security reasons; OAI put someone on gov rel about a year ago, beltway insider type, and they have been selling aggressively. Feels like most of the federal procurement is going to want to go to using primes for this stuff, or if OpenAI and Anthropic can sell successfully, fine.

Grok winning the Federal bid is an interesting possible outcome though. I think that, slightly de-Elon-ed, the messaging that it's been trained to be more politically neutral (I realize that this is a large step from how it's messaged) might be a real factor in the next few years in the US. Should be interesting!

Fudged71 - you want to predict openai value and importance in 2029? We'll still both be on HN I'm sure. I'm going to predict it's a dominant player, and I'll go contra-Gwern, and say that it will still be known as best-in-class product delivered AI, whether or not an Anthropic or other company has best-in-class LLM tech. Basically, I think they'll make it and sustain.

Somehow I missed the Anduril partnership announcement. I agree with you. National Security relationships in particular creates a moat that’s hard to replicate even with superior technology.

It seems possible OpenAI could maintain dominance in government/institutional markets while facing more competition in commercial segments, similar to how defense contractors operate.

Now we just need to find someone who disagrees with us and we can make a long bet.

It feels strange to say but I think that the product moat looks harder than the LLM moat for the top 5 teams right now. I'm surprised I think that, but I've assessed so many L and MLM models in the last 18 months, and they keep getting better, albeit more slowly, and they keep getting smaller while they lose less quality, and tooling keeps getting better on them.

At the same time, all the product infra around using, integrating, safety, API support, enterprise contracts, data security, threat analysis, all that is expensive and hard for startups in a way that spending $50mm with a cloud AI infra company is not hard.

Altman's new head of product is reputed to be excellent as well, so it will be super interesting to see where this all goes.

IBM was legally compelled to spin that off

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