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Comment by asa400 | Hacker News Reader

What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here.

What prevents people from just using Google, who can build AI stuff into their existing massive search/ads/video/email/browser infrastructure?

Normal, non-technical users can't tell the difference between these models at all, so their usage numbers are highly dependent on marketing. Google has massive distribution with world-wide brands that people already know, trust, and pay for, especially in enterprise.

Google doesn't have to go to the private markets to raise capital, they can spend as much of their own money as they like to market the living hell out of this stuff, just like they did with Chrome. The clock is running on OpenAI. At some point OpenAI's investors are going to want their money back.

I'm not saying Google is going to win, but if I had to bet on which company's money runs out faster, I'm not betting against Google.

View on HN

Consumer brand quality is so massively underrated by tech people.

ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand. That's worth 100x more than "product stickiness". They have 700 million weekly users and growing much faster than Google.

I think your points on Google being well positioned are apt for capitalization reasons, but only one company has consumer mindshare on "AI" and its the one with "ai" in its name.

I’ve got “normie” friends who I’d bet don’t even know that what Google has at the top of their search results is “AI” results and instead assume it’s just some extension of the normal search results we’ve all gotten used to (knowledge graph)

Every one of them refers to using “ChatGPT” when talking about AI.

How likely is it to stay that way? No idea, but OpenAI has clearly captured a notable amount of mindshare in this new era.

when people started referring to searching the internet as googling, they know their brand has made it.

It is the same with chatGPT.

Yep, this. I’ve switched to Claude for a while (because I can’t afford max plans for both) and nobody in the real world has any idea what it is I’m talking about. “Oh it’s like ChatGPT?”

Claude is also difficult to consistently pronounce for a non-English speaker. Sometimes people dont say that because it can get misinterpreted. ChatGPT is something easy on the the tongue and very difficult to mis-pronounce.

The CEO is also more puritan than the pope himself considering the amount of censorship it has. Not sure if they are even interested in marketing to normies though.

> The CEO is also more puritan than the pope himself considering the amount of censorship it has.

In that case, you should try OpenAI's gpt-oss!

Both models are pretty fast for their size and I wanted to use them to summarize stories and try out translation. But it keeps checking everything against "policy" all the time! I created a jailbreak that works around this, but it still wastes a few hundred tokens talking about policy before it produces useful output.

Surely someone has abliterated it by now

Ah yes, the Latin-originating French name that has a variant at least in every Latin language is hard to pronounce for non-English users.

https://chat.mistral.ai/chat/12da2e83-f3f1-4a47-b432-753cac2...

I suspect they chose that name because of the proximity with the word "cloud".

I know a lot of people who refer to it as ChatGTP which I assume stands for German treebrained performers

Even I often tell I chatgeepeeteed the result, in the same fashion when I continue saying I googled the result, while actually I used Duck Duck Go. I could ask another LLM provider, but I have no idea how to communicate that properly to a non-technical folks. Heck, I don’t want to communicate that _properly_ to tech peers either. I don’t like these pedantic phrases ‘well, actually … that wasn’t Google, I used DDG for that.’ Sometimes I can say ‘web search,’ but ‘I googled that’ is just more natural thing to say.

Same here. I tried saying ‘I asked LLM’ or ‘I asked AI’ but that doesn’t sound right for me. So, in most conversations I say ‘I asked Chat GPT’ and in most of these situations, it feels like the exact provider does not matter, since essentially they are very similar in their nature.

>I asked AI doesn't sound right for me.

That's a you thing.

Hey, but it’s not AI!

I like to go with 'I asked my bot|chatbot'

I cheekily refer to it as Al (like, short for Albert) because Google seems to love to shove Al's overviews in my search results.

But when I'm being more serious I'd usually just say "I asked GPT"

I have a colleague who just refers to AI as "Chat" which I think is kinda cute, but people also use the term "chat" to refer to... Like, people, or "yall". Or to their stream chat.

I recently used "an unreliable source that gives fast answers to questions" in a comment here. I think I will keep on using it.

Hey, that’s a nice one!

In the UK, everyone refers to a vacuum as a 'hoover'. They are not the dominant vacuum brand there despite the massive name recognition.

BAND-AID is another one

And "generic trademark" is the Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

Huh, bubble wrap, even.

Tannoy another.

On the other hand, no one cares about Velcro or Tupperware

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRi8LptvFZY

Video description, from the Velcro brand YouTube channel:

Our Velcro Brand Companies legal team decided to clear a few things up about using the VELCRO® trademark correctly – because they’re lawyers and that’s what they do. When you use “velcro” as a noun or a verb (e.g., velcro shoes), you diminish the importance of our brand and our lawyers lose their insert fastening sound. So please, do not say “velcro shoes” (or “velcro wallet” or “velcro gloves”) - we repeat “velcro” is not a noun or a verb. VELCRO® is our brand. #dontsayvelcro

their own fault :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion

Same with "Pampers" in Poland. Everyone says "pampersy" when referring to just generic diapers. Almost nobody buys the literal "Pampers" brand.

I'm not sure if physical products are analogous to internet services. If all it took to vacuum your house was typing "Hoover" into a browser, and everyone called vacuums "a Hoover," then I would expect Hoover to have 90% of the vacuum market share.

But since buying a vacuum usually involves going to a store, looking at available devices, and paying for them, the value of a brand name is less significant.

Pre-pandemic, at least in my social circles, "Skype" was the term for video calling. "Hey, wanna Skype?" and we'd hop on a discord call.

Post-pandemic, at work and such, "Zoom" has become synonymous for work call. Whether it's via Slack or Google Meet, or even Zoom, we use the term Zoom.

I don't know what the market share is on Skype (Pre-pandemic) or Zoom, but these common terms appear to exist for software.

'Pampers' and 'Xerox' in Russia.

When I talk about any AI usage I do. I just say chatgpt to any friends.

> They have 700 million weekly users and growing much faster than Google.

Years old company growing faster than decades old company!

2.5 billion people use Gmail. I assume people check their mail (and, more importantly, receive mail) much more often than weekly.

ChatGPT has a lot of growing to do to catch up, even if it's faster

I read that as OpenAI’s WAU is showing a steeper increase than Google ever did. Not saying it’s factually accurate, just that it’s not a fixed point-in-time comparison :)

There are 2 billion more humans living now than in 2000 though, and the world is much more technology oriented.

The focus on WAU is a tell though. How much data can OpenAI use for advertising if I interact with it weekly?

When I ask about which toaster is best, is it going to show me ads for a motorcycle because that's what I asked about last week?

My wife asked for information about a product, and ChatGPT fed her a handful of blatant product ads. She told the AI never to do that again, and that was the last time she saw that format of output.

I would wager that she was part of an A/B testing group, so her instruction may not have any real effect. However, we were both appalled by that output and immediately discussed alternative AI options, should such a change become permanent.

This isn’t the rise of Google, where they have a vastly superior product and can boil us frogs by slowly serving us more and more ads. We are already boiling mad from having become hypersensitive to products wholly tainted by ads.

We ain’t gunna take it anymore.

> ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand.

If by "phenomenal" you mean "the premier slop and spam provider", then yes.

Sadly that's not how the wider public sees it.

That's exactly how the wider public sees it.

It just turns out that the wider public loves peddling slop. (Not so much though when on the receiving end.)

my mom sees it as a nice internet bloke that helps her with writing emails. She once asked why it can't change background of her image from white to red if it can generate all that amazing art, and was genuinely disappointed that she can't get it to understand what she wants. You have skewed view on public perception on llms - they don't think about it, they just use it.

> helps her with writing emails

Yeah, exactly - like I said, generating slop.

(That same hypothetical mom will get annoyed when on the receiving end of a slop-generated email, though.)

Google has to be shitting its pants. No one knows what is "gemini", probably some stupid nerd thing. Normies knows ChatGPT and that is what matters.

They might be. Google has been getting mildly 'aggressive' in their emails pleading with me to use gemini and I have yet to try it ( and that is despite being mildly interested ). There is a reason first mover's advantage is a real thing. People stick with what they think they know.

> ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand. That's worth 100x more than "product stickiness". They have 700 million weekly users

I don't think majority of those 700m people use the product because of the brand. Products are a non-trivial contributor to the brand.

Also, if it were phenomenal, they wouldn't be called ClosedAI ;)

> ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand.

My observation is different: ChatGPT may be well-known, but does not have a really good reputation anymore (I'd claim that it is in average of equal dubious reputation as Google) in particular in consideration of

- a lot of public statements and actions of Sam Altman (in particular his involvement into Worldcoin (iris scanning) makes him untolerable for being the CEO of a company that is concerned about its reputation)

- the attempts to overthrow Sam Altman's throne

- most people know that OpenAI at least in the past collaborated a lot with Microsoft (not a company that is well-regarded). But the really bad thing is that the A"I" features that Microsoft introduced into basically every product are hated by users. Since people know that these at least originated in ChatGPT products, this stained OpenAI's reputation a lot. Lesson: choose carefully who you collaborate with.

You massively overestimate what people actually know and read about. If you are in the tech sphere these things might be obvious to you, but I assure you regular people are not keeping track as closely.

I bet at most 10 % of people in the West can name the CEO of OpenAI.

Normal people that use ChatGPT have never heard of Sam Altman, especially outside the US. These points are only in tech and financial circles.

Eh. Altman is not Musk in terms of negative coverage or average sentiment on the net. That might change in the future, but my personal guess is that your perception may be based on spending too much time in a specific echo chamber. I personally like to use people who don't use llms at all for a proper grounding. In those cases, Altman name does not exist, while Musk barely registers.

> Altman is not Musk in terms of negative coverage or average sentiment on the net.

I can assure you that in Germany (where people are very sensitive with respect to privacy topics), Sam Altman (in particular because of his involvement with Worldcoin ("iris scanning" -> surveillance)) has a very bad reputation by many people.

Fair point. I was being too US-centric in my response.

Most normal people don't know about these things they don't even know who Sam Altman is, for example my family that are not Americans they know about chat gpt but they don't know who Sam Altman is

While I agree, we saw this play out with Dropbox too.

Sure, "ChatGPT" has entered the common consciousness as the name of LLM chatbots as a product.

But does that mean that all of the people who talk about "asking ChatGPT" are actually asking ChatGPT, from OpenAI?

How many of them are actually asking Claude? Or Gemini? Or some other LLM?

That's the trouble when your brand name gets genericized.

> What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here.

Would have agreed with you untill I saw the meltdown of people losing their "friend" when chatgpt 5 was released. Somehow openai has fallen into a "sticky" userbase.

Will people accept ads from their “computer friend”? Might feel like the Truman Show when your friend starts giving you promo codes in casual conversation

Wait, your friends don't casually always give you promo codes?

Wrong kind of stickiness, I'm afraid.

>non-technical users can't tell the difference between these models at all

My non-tech friend said she prefer ChatGPT more than Gemini, most due to its tone.

So non-tech people may not know the different in technical detail, but they sure can have bias.

I have a non-techy friend who used 4o for that exact reason. Compared to most readily available chatbots, 4o just provides more engaging answers to non-techy questions. He likes to have extended conversations about philosophy and consciousness with it. I showed him R1, and he was fascinated by the reasoning process. Makes sense, given the sorts of questions he likes to ask it.

I think OpenAI is pursuing a different market from Google right now. ChatGPT is a companion, Gemini is a tool. That's a totally arbitrary divide, though. Change out the system prompts and the web frontend. Ta-daa, you're in a different market segment now.

ChatGpt has won. I talk to all teens living nearby and they all use chatgpt and not Google.

The teens, they don't know what is OpenAI, they don't know what is Gemini. They sure know what is ChatGPT.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but people said the same thing about Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, etc. in 1999. Interesting times, then and now.

I think the biggest risk to ChatGPT as a consumer brand is that they don’t own the device surface. Google / Microsoft / Apple could make great AI that’s infused in the OS / browser, eliminating the need to go to ChatGPT.

Since microsoft kinda sorta owns or is merging with openai it's probably already close to that... copilot is constantly down for me at least, but I assume that's not a hard thing to fix on Microsoft's end if it wants to start paying the server costs...

All of these teens use Google Docs instead of OpenAI Docs, Google Meet instead of OpenAI Meet, Gmail instead of OpenAI Mail, etc.

I'm sure that far fewer people to go gemini.google.com than to chatgpt.com, but Google has LLMs seamlessly integrated in each of these products, and it's a part of people's workflows at school and at work.

For a while, I was convinced that OpenAI had won and that Google won't be able to recover, but this lack of vertical integration is becoming a liability. It's probably why OpenAI is trying to branch into weird stuff, like running a walled-garden TikTok clone.

Also keep in mind that unlike OpenAI, Google isn't under pressure to monetize AI products any time soon. They can keep subsidizing them until OpenAI runs out of other people's money. I'm not saying OpenAI has no path forward, but it's not all that clear-cut.

I think the beneficiary is wrong here. Those teens will grow up to work for organizaitons using Azure AD, Windows, Office and OneDrive/SharePoint/Teams.

If any company is going to get the windfall of "AI provider by default" it is going to be Microsoft. Possibly powered by OpenAI models running on Azure.

Google could make a "better" (basically - more sublime) advertising platform but little to attract new users. Perhaps Android usage would rise - Apple _is_ behind on AI after all. On the other hand, users will either use the AI integrated into Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Teams, Edge and more, or else users' AI of choice (ChatGPT) will learn to as competently drive the Windows and Web UIs as Claude Code drives bash, giving a productive experience with your desktop (and cloud) apps.

Once you use _that_ tool, its now where you start asking questions, not google.com. I am constantly asking ChatGPT and Claude about things I might be purchasing, making comparisons, etc (amongst many other things I might possibly google). Microsoft has an existing interest in advertising, and OpenAI is currently exploring how best go about it. My bet isn't on Google right now.

Possibly, but I don't think that Microsoft apps have the kind of a foothold in the corporate world that they used to have.

Sure, if you join a bank or a government agency, or a big company that's been around for 40+ years, you're probably gonna be using Microsoft products. But the bulk of startups, schools, and small businesses use Google products nowadays.

Judging by their MX record, OpenAI is a Google shop... so is Perplexity... so is Anthropic... so is Mistral.

> I think the beneficiary is wrong here. Those teens will grow up to work for organizaitons (sic) using Azure AD, Windows, Office and OneDrive/SharePoint/Teams.

Idk, younger companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are using google.

If young people are mostly using google docs, sheets etc companies might adapt to use these, actually I already seen it happen

>All of these teens use Google Docs instead of OpenAI Docs, Google Meet instead of OpenAI Meet, Gmail instead of OpenAI Mail, etc.

Billions of people use Meta apps and products. Meta AI is all over all those apps. Why is usage minuscule compared to ChatGPT or even Gemini ? Google has billions of users, many using devices operating their own OS, in which Gemini is now the default AI assistant, so why does ChatGPT usage still dwarf Gemini's ?

People need to understand that just because you have users of product x, that doesn't mean you can just swoop in and convert them to product y even if you stuff it in their faces. Yes it's better than starting from scratch but that's about it. In the consumer LLM space, Open AI have by far the biggest brand and these mega conglomerates need to beat that and not the other way around. AI features in Google mail is not going to make people stop using GPT anymore than Edge being bundled in Windows will made people stop using Chrome.

And Meta is making billions in profits using AI for ad targeting. They have a real business model.

But once people start leaving where they display those ads they are in real trouble.

Nah. No one is using Meta AI because it's shoehorned into contexts where you don't actually need it. And that's because these happen to be the only surfaces that Meta controls. They know full well they won't win there, which is probably why they're so desperate for a "hail Mary" in the VR / AR space.

For the average person, what's the most serious / valuable use of ChatGPT right now? It's stuff like writing essays, composing emails, planning tasks. This is precisely the context in which Google has a foothold. You don't need to open ChatGPT and then copy-and-paste if you have an AI button directly in the text editor or in the email app.

>No one is using Meta AI because it's shoehorned into contexts where you don't actually need it.

What's shoehorned about LLMs in a messaging app? This kind of casual conversation is a significant amount of LLM usage? Open AI says non-work queries account for about 70% of ChatGPT usage. They say that '“Practical Guidance,” “Seeking Information,” and “Writing”' are the 3 mot common topics, so really, how is it shoehorned to place this in Facebook ? [0]

>For the average person, what's the most serious / valuable use of ChatGPT right now? It's stuff like writing essays, composing emails, planning tasks. This is precisely the context in which Google has a foothold. You don't need to open ChatGPT and then copy-and-paste if you have an AI button directly in the text editor or in the email app.

Lol I don't know what else to tell you but that really doesn't matter, but it's not like you have to take my word for it. Copilot is baked in the Microsoft Office Suite. The Microsoft Office Suite dwarfs Google Docs, Sheets etc (yes even for students) in terms of usage. What impact has this had on Open AI and chatGPT ? Absolutely nothing.

[0] https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/

I keep hearing that from Meta Propaganda. All those fascinating AI stats.

I've never once seen Meta AI.

Like most people, I once clicked on what looks a chat- or contacts-related search field in Whatsapp when that appeared in the UI.

>Google Docs instead of…

All of these teens use Microsoft Word instead of Google Word, Microsoft NetMeeting instead of Google NetMeeting, Microsoft Hotmail instead of Google Mail, etc.

I’m sure far fewer people go to MSN Search than to Google.com, but Microsoft has Windows integrated into all of these products, and it’s part of people’s workflows at school and at work.

When you say ‘Word’, do you mean the app, the web app, or the Teams app? They don’t work well together and leave documents looking truly awful on whichever variant you aren’t currently using.

That this bonfire is an industry standard has to be embarrassing for Microsoft.

> All of these teens use Google Docs instead of OpenAI Docs, Google Meet instead of OpenAI Meet, Gmail instead of OpenAI Mail, etc.

Google Docs, Google Meet and Gmail provide a tiny fraction of Google's overall revenue. And they're hardly integrated in with Google's humongous money maker, search, in a way that matters (Gmail has ads but my guess is that its direct revenue is tiny compared to search - the bigger value is the personalization of ads that Google can do by knowing more about you).

> I'm sure that far fewer people to go gemini.google.com than to chatgpt.com, but Google has LLMs seamlessly integrated in each of these products, and it's a part of people's workflows at school and at work.

But the product isn't "LLMs", the product is really "where do people go to find information", because that is where the money to be made in ads is.

I definitely don't think that OpenAI "winning" means Google is going anywhere soon, but I do agree with the comments that OpenAI has a huge amount of advertising potential, and that for a lot of people, especially younger people, "ChatGPT" is how they think of gen AI, and it's there first go-to resource when they want to look something up online.

> Google Docs, Google Meet and Gmail provide a tiny fraction of Google's overall revenue.

I don't understand your argument here. Like Chrome and Android, these products exist to establish foothold, precisely so that Microsoft or OpenAI can't take Google's lunch.

My point is that brand recognition doesn't matter: if you can get equivalent functionality the easy way (a click of a button in Docs), you're not going to open a separate app and copy-and-paste stuff.

All of this will make it harder for OpenAI to maintain moat and stop burning money. Especially when their path to making money is to make LLMs worse (i.e., product placement / ads), while Google has more than enough income to let people enjoy untainted AI products for a very long time.

Even for search, right now, I'm pretty sure there are orders of magnitude more people relying on Google Search AI snippets than on ChatGPT. As these snippets get better and cover more queries, the reasons to talk to a chatbot disappear.

I'm not saying it's a forgone conclusion, but I think that OpenAI is at a pretty significant disadvantage.

> My point is that brand recognition doesn't matter: if you can get equivalent functionality the easy way (a click of a button in Docs), you're not going to open a separate app and copy-and-paste stuff.

I couldn't disagree more with this statement. So far I've seen companies trying to shoehorn AI into all these existing apps and lots of us hate it. I want Docs to be Docs - even if I'm writing some sort of research paper on a topic, I still don't want to do my research in Docs, because they're two completely separate mental tasks for me. There have been legions of failed attempts to make "everything and the kitchen sink" apps, and they usually suck.

> Even for search, right now, I'm pretty sure there are orders of magnitude more people relying on Google Search AI snippets than on ChatGPT. As these snippets get better and cover more queries, the reasons to talk to a chatbot disappear.

I'm sure that's true for older people, where Google is "the default", but just look at all the comments in this thread about where younger people/teenagers go first for information. For a lot of these folks ChatGPT is "the default", as as that is Google's big fear, that they will lose a generation of folks who associate "ChatGPT" with "AI" just like a previous generation associated "Google" with "search".

You're absolutely right about ChatGPT's consumer mindshare, and I think a lot of people undervalue that.

Having Gemini in docs is useful, though. You can ask questions about the document without copying back and forth and context switching. Plus, it has access to the company's entire corpus, and so can understand company-specific concepts and acronyms.

Hell, I had a manager jokingly ask it for a status update meeting for another related project. According to someone actually involved with that project, it actually gave a good answer.

Not really. Those teens use Microsoft products, not google ones because that's what schools provide

What is Google's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here. What prevents people from just using Altavista/Yahoo/[any other search engine].

You vastly underestimate the power of habit and branding combined together. Just like then, the vast majority of people equate ChatGPT with AI chatbot, there is no concept of alternative AI chatbot. Sure people might have seen some AI looking thing called Copilot and some weird widget in the Google Search results but so far ChatGPT is winning the marketing game even if the offerings from rivals might be the same or even superior sometimes

Google has defaults as their huge moat. They have Chrome and Android under their control and pay Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine.

Here in Europe this is mitigated by them having to show a browser/search engine selection screen, but in the US you seem to be more accepting of the monopoly power. Or it seems the Judge in Calfornia seems to think that OpenAI actually has a change of winning this. It doesn't in my estimation.

On the other side Google has a monopoly on Ads. When OpenAI somehow starts displaying ads, they'd have to build their own Ad network and then entice companies and brands to use it. Good luck with that.

Google's competitive moat 20-25 years ago was being a significantly better search engine than the alternatives. That remained true for decades.

You can't say the same about ChatGPT. And Google wasn't spending $4 to make $1 almost 10 years after its founding, which will become an issue at some point.

> What prevents people from just using Altavista/Yahoo/[any other search engine].

Google shows the results you're looking for. At least this was true when they were in competition with the engines you mentioned, they had genuine quality advantage.

ChatGPT (and all the competitors) are trivially sticky products: I have a lot of ongoing conversations in there, that I pick up all the time. Add more long term memory stuff — a direction I am sure they will keep pushing — and all of the sudden there is a lot of personal data that you rely on it having, that make the product better and that most people will never care to replicate/transfer. Just being the product that people use makes you the product that people will use. "the other app doesn't know me" is the moat. The data that people put in it is the moat.

This. I am not sure why or how this is missed, but because you cannot easily port context ( maybe yet ), the stickiness increases with every conversation assuming your questions are not encyclopedia type questions that don't need follow up.

Do you actually curate your contexts? I did in the early days, but I just create new ones now.

Hmm. You got me thinking. I rarely delete conversations, but I don't randomly engage either unless I am curious how llm will respond in a given scenario. For example, last time I was comparing how my output compared against some of the other online community. Maybe curate is too strong a word? Maybe I select for specific desired paths?

technically you can export any single conversation and try to continue them in another LLM…

but migration of all this personal knowledge / context en masse is not convenient.

and i’m sure openai won’t make it easy to escape the little labyrinth they’re building for us

Brand is the second most important moat (only shy to regulation capture).

If normal people start saying "ChatGPT" to refer to AI they win, just like how google became a verb for search.

It seems to be the case.

As a counter, you can buy a hell of a lot of brand for $8 billion dollars though.

You can give your most active 50,000 users $160,000 each, for example.

You can run campaign ads in every billboard, radio, tv station and every facebook feed tarring and feathering ChatGPT

Hell, for only $200m you could just get the current admin to force ChatGPT to sell to Larry Ellison, and deport Sam Altman to Abu Dahbi like Nermal from Garfield.

So many options!

Yes, and it's what they're doing. Buying brand.

> OpenAI also spent US$2 billion on sales and ad

According to Google, Coca Cola spent over $5B on advertising in 2024 and most of the world already knows who they are. I think $8B (or the $2B OpenAI spent) buys a lot less branding than you think.

Do you want to be sold sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and see AI change the world?”

Users' chat history is the moat. The more you use it, the more it knows about you and can help you in ways that are customized to particular user. That makes it sticky, more so than web search. Also brand recognition, ChatGPT is the default general purpose LLM choice for most people. Everyone and their mom is using it.

Gemini is probably the default general purpose LLM since its answers are inserted into every google result.

Walling in my personal data would be a sure sign way to get me to not use OpenAI.

Is there a way, today, for me to move the project folders I have in the paid version to another AI product?

> What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here.

Doesn't look worse than Google Search's moat to me? And that worked really well for a long time.

"At some point OpenAI's investors are going to want their money back."

They do now, that's why they are using a shell game to pump up the stock value.

It's a distinctive brand, pleasant user experience, and a trustworthy product, like every other commodified technology on the planet.

That's all that matters now. We've passed the "good enough" bar for llms for the majority of consumer use cases.

From here out it's like selling cellphones and laptops

Yeah most people genuinely cannot tell the difference in quality between those top models. People here jerk off to some benchmarks but in real life that crap is completely meaningless

Google is lacking a coherent product vision. They are trying to foot their models' output everywhere, creating chaos. Meanwhile, Gemini chats are not synced between web and Android app, and this is ridiculous.

There is definitely stickiness if you're a frequent user. It has a history of hundreds of conversations. It knows a lot about me.

Switching would be like coding with a brand new dev environment. Can I do it? Sure, but I don't want to.

> Normal, non-technical users can't tell the difference between these models at all, so their usage numbers are highly dependent on marketing.

When I think as a “normal” user, I can definitely see difference between them all.

As history showed us numerous times, it doesn't even have to be the best to win. It rarely is, really. See the most pervasive programming languages for that.

I'm saying Google is going to win. They're not beholden to their current architecture as much as other shovelmakers and can pivot their TPU to offer the best inference perf/$. They also hold about as much personal data as anyone else and have plenty of stuff to train on in-house. I work for a competitor and even I think there's a good chance google "wins"(there's never a winner because the race never ends).

Is there publicly available evidence that TPU perf/$ is better than Blackwell ?

I know it seems intuitively true but was surprised to not really find evidence for it.

yeah ... poly market and other makers seem to be betting that Google by year's end or sometime next year or so will have teh best gen ai models on the market ... but I've been using Claude sonnet 4.5 with GitHub Copilot and swear by it.

anyways would be nice to really see some apples-to-apples benchmarks of the TPU vs Nvidia hardware but how would that work given CUDA is not hardware agnostic?

I think we are all forgetting that Google is a massive bureaucracy that has to move out of its own way to get anything done. The younger companies have a distinct advantage here. Hence the cycle of company growth and collapse.I think openai and the like have a very good chance here.

> I think we are all forgetting that Google is a massive bureaucracy that has to move out of its own way to get anything done

This was true pre-ChatGPT, but Google is releasing and updating products furiously now. It's hard to think of a part of the AI space where Google does not have the leading or a very competitive offering.

The problem is that Google is horrible at product. They have been so spot on at search it's covered up all the other issues around products. YT is great, but they bought that. The Pixel should the Android phone, but they do a poor job marketing. They should be leading AI, but stumbled multiple times in the rollout. They normally get the tech right, and then fumble the productizing and marketing.

Pixel being undermarketed is deliberate, Android is an alliance and they don't want to compete against Samsung too hard.

But Google have other weaknesses. In the most valuable market (the USA) Google is very politically exposed. The left don't like them because they're big rich techbro capitalists, the Democrats tried to break them up. The right hate them because of their ongoing censorship, social engineering and cancellation of the right. They're rapidly running out of friends.

Just compare:

https://www.google.com/search?q=conservative+ai

https://www.bing.com/search?q=conservative+ai

The Google SERP is a trash fire, and it must be deliberate. It's almost like the search engine is broken. Not a single conservative chat bot ranks. On Bing the results are full of what the searcher is looking for. ChatGPT isn't perfect but it's a lot less biased than Google is. Its search results come from Bing which is more politically neutral. Also Altman is a fresh face who hasn't antagonized the right in the same way Google has. For ~half the population Gemini is still branded as "the bot that drew black nazis and popes", ChatGPT isn't. That's an own goal they didn't need.

> There's no product stickiness here.

Very few of those 700,000,000 active users have ever heard of Claude or DeepSeek or ________. Gemini maybe.

For consumer product, memory, the recent pulse one and _much awaited_ ai feed are the products that will build stickiness. I pay for both claude and openai currently and it is much more difficult to continue a chat on other platform as the context systems isn’t something i can cook up swiftly.

Let me direct you to the reddit AMA where people were literally begging to bring back 4o.

Yeah, anyone saying "Normal, non-technical users can't tell the difference between these models at all" isn't talking to that many normal, non-technical users.

> Google has massive distribution with world-wide brands that people already know, trust, and pay for, especially in enterprise.

Do people trust Google in a positive sense? I trust them to try force me to login and to spam me with adverts.

Chats have contexts. While search engines try to track you it is spookier because it is unclear to the user how the contexts are formed. In chats at least the contexts are transparent to both the provider and the user.

What prevents people from just using Google, who can build AI stuff into their existing massive search/ads/video/email/browser infrastructure?

Google have never had a viable competitor. Their moat on Search and Ads has been so incredibly hard to beat that no one has even come close. That has given them an immense amount of money from search ads. That means they've appeared to be impossible to beat, but if you look at literally all their other products they aren't top in anything else despite essentially unlimited resources.

A company becoming a viable competitor to Google Search and/or Ads is not something we can easily predict the outcome of. Many companies in the past who have had a 'monopoly' have utterly fallen apart at the first sign of real competition. We even have a term for it that YC companies love to scatter around their pitch decks - 'disruption'. If OpenAI takes even just 5% of the market Google will need to either increase their revenue by $13bn (hard, or they'd have done that already) or they'll need to start cutting things. Or just make $13bn less profit I guess. I don't think that would go down well though.

Aren't Chrome and Gmail also pretty much number one in their areas? I don't really use either one, but that's my impression. Also Android.

Chrome and Gmail don't really make any money for Google.

Currently their moat is history. Why I keep coming back to ChatGPT is it ‘remembers’ our previous chats, so I don’t have to explain things over and over again. And this history builds up over time.

Not sure how this argues their moat. The context window in pretty small (at best 192k on 5 with the right subscription). Once you run past it, history is lost or becomes gimmicky. Gemini 2.5 Pro by contrast offers 1M. Llama 4 offers 10M (though seems to perform substantially worse).

Brand name and ChatGPT being the synonym of AI. Just like google is a synonym for search. That right there is very powerful.

Brand. Brand. Brand!

Literally nobody but nerds know what a Claude is among many others.

ChatGPT has name recognition and that matters massively.

The name ChatGpt is probably the most valuable brand at the moment. Everybody is talking and using it.

Yeah, for me, the biggest issue is, counter-intuitively given it's Google, I know Gemini is going to continue existing as a product for a long time; I feel comfortable storing data and building things out for it. Anthropic's putting out great models, but it's financially endangered, and OpenAI isn't doing great either; and I'm confident Gemini 3 release will put it right back at top-of-pack again as far as model output quality, so these little windows where I'm not using The Best are not a big deal.

Once the single-focus companies have to actually make a profit and flip the switch from poorly monetized to fully monetized, I think folks will be immediately jumping ship to mega-companies like Google who can indefinitely sustain the freemium model. The single-focus services are going to be Hell to use once the free rides end: price hikes, stingy limits, and ads everywhere.

.... but the field will change unpredictably. Amazon offers a lot of random junk with Prime -- hike price $50/year, slap on a subscription to high-grade AI chatbot 10% of users will actually use (say 2% are "heavy users"), and now Anthropic is financially sustainable. Maybe NYT goes from $400 to $500 per year, and now you get ChatGPT Pro, so everything's fine at OpenAI. There're a ton of financial ideas you'll come up with once you feel the fire at your feet; maybe the US government will take a stake and start shilling services when you file taxes. Do you want the $250 Patriot Package charged against your tax refund, or are we throwing this in the evidence pile containing your Casio F91-W purchase and tribal tattoos?

I don’t want to use google anymore - bad search results, too many ads.

> What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here.

20 years ago everyone said the exact same thing about Google Search.

I mean, how could you possibly build a $3T company off of a search input field, when users can just decide to visit a different search input field??

Surprise. Brand is the most powerful asset you can build in the consumer space. It turns out monetization possibilities become infinite once you capture the cultural zeitgeist, as you can build an ecosystem of products and eventually a walled garden monopoly.

AI has been incredibly sticky. Look at the outrage, OpenAI couldn't even deprecate 4o or whatever because it's incredibly popular. Those people aren't leaving OAI if they're not even leaving a last gen model.

>What is OpenAI's competitive moat?

The broken record's still running, someone please turn it off!

At this point I think people just suffer from some sort of borderline mental disorder.

700 MAUs in just a couple years? In a red(-pretty-much-pure-blood) ocean? Against companies who've been in the business for 20 years?

One would have to be quite dumb or obtuse not to see it.

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