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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

Lack of network effects... It's the biggest thing ever! Everyone is talking about it, all the time, nonstop! How is that not a network? Network effects do not exclusively mean multiplayer software, communications or social media. And anyway, it is almost certainly all three of these things, because content is being made (and often consumed) by ChatGPT in every digital network there is.

Anyway, I don't think it's possible in this forum to have a conversation about it, if "ChatGPT is humongous" is a controversial, downvotable POV.

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> How is that not a network?

A network effect is ~ "I must use this specifically because the people I am connected to, socially or professionally, also use this".

I can trivially replace OpenAI's ChatGPT with DeepSeek or Anthropic's Claude, and indeed often do so.

For any of these providers to benefit from a network effect, it has to do to LLMs what Microsoft did to spreadsheets with Office. I think one of these businesses may well be able to, but so far, none have.

I don't know if you are joking or not, but people were talking about ChatGPT non-stop in like March of 2023 in my social group. Now it's far less frequently mentioned, basically never. In fact mostly if it is, it's in some form of a sarcastic joke or reply.

> Everyone is talking about it, all the time, nonstop! How is that not a network?

Network effect in this context means the product is successful primarily because everyone else is using it. Not easy to compete with Instagram/Tiktok because you need most users to use your new app, not just a few. Amazon can only deliver fast because they have a huge delivery network, because most people use Amazon.

No such effect or moat exists for AI companies. In fact, it is the opposite. Same prompt will give you very similar results in any AI product.

You can't compete with amazon now, even with a better product. But you can easily kill AI companies if you have a better model.

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