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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I don't like Proton but don't see how you can blame them on this: ChatGPT is now the 5th-most visited website on the Internet, there's a huge market demand.

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Mainly I don't think Proton is serious competitor here. I'm not sure there is much of a market demand for mediocre white labelled LLMs priced at a premium. I can see it carving a bit of a niche with privacy-focused customers already in their ecosystem, but I don't see this taking off for them.

I echo the parent comment. I'm really on a Proton user for email and VPN. The quality drops off rather quickly after that. Calendar, Drive, Pass, and Wallet are all adequate at best; their primary selling point is not being Google rather than being particularly well built or supported. I would rather see them focus on being a truly competitive ecosystem.

I'm also not terribly impressed at the way they've positioned Lumo as a separate service from the existing Scribe AI features, and so conveniently not part of Ultimate plans.

Most people would also not believe there's much of a market for mediocre email priced at a premium. But it turns out if you market the privacy angle, there is.

I really want a source for your ChatGPT claim

Not GOP but probably this Wikipedia article [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites

There's huge demand, for sure.

But there's also huge competition. You're not going to out-spend Google or Facebook or Apple or OpenAI or Baidu or Alibaba easily. And the likes of Google may have been caught napping a few years ago, but they've since woken up.

Still, I guess it's probably good for attracting investors, regardless of long-term profitability.

You don't need to outspend them or capture a huge percentage of the market. It's not a win-or-lose situation: there's a small-to-medium market for open-source model wrappers with a privacy angle, and you can make some money from it.

The AI angle aside, I spend a lot of time wishing that people and companies could be happy with a good thing.

You don't need to crush your competition and drink from their skulls while squeezing every ounce of money out of your customers. You could just do something, be good at it, and be sustainability making a month-to-month profit instead of chasing exponential growth at all costs

That's a good sentiment, but that's not how capital investing works. Imagine we're 5 years in the future, OpenAI is doing well and "sustaining" and you have another company, say, Google, growing at a faster clip or atleast priorizing growth.

You have $100 then, and where will you put the money. Will you give money to Sam Altman, who says, great I'll give you $105 because we're "sustaining" and not chasing profits at all, or to Sundar Pichai who says I'll give you $120 beacuse we're prioritizing growth.

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