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Comment by aerhardt | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'm extremely loyal to ChatGPT Plus and Codex, but is't because OpenAI has a native Mac app that I like, and Codex included with Plus and has served me well enough to not look at Claude. I like GPT-5 quite a bit as a user. I'll concede none of these are small things - they've had my money for 2+ years - but they're not gigantic advantages either.

At an enterprise level however, in the current workload I am dealing with, I can't get GPT-5 with high thinking to yield acceptable results; Gemini 2.5 Pro is crushing it in my tests.

Things are changing fast, and OpenAI seems to be the most dynamic player in terms of productization, but I'm still failing to see the moat.

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I think their moat is ironically the platform.

Like Apple vs every other computer maker.

Their platform mostly just works. Their api playground and docs are like 100x better than whatever garbage Anthropic has.

I think their UX is way better, and I can have long AF conversations without lagging. I can even change models in the same conversation. Basic shit Anthropic can’t figure out (they can fleece their 20x max subscribers tho)

I think if they get the AI human interface right, they will have their iPhone moment and 10x.

The platform is just a search tool and extended processing modes. That is easily replicated elsewhere.

The only moat they have is the fact that you still need a GPU of some kind to reliably run even a tiny LLM. But the gap between what absolutely needs a server farm and what can be ran on a store bought gaming computer is quickly closing. You can already run mixture of experts models on gaming rigs with a high degree of usability compared to just one year ago. And that tech continues to be pushed further and further. It's only a matter of time until we see ChatGPT levels of access running on a quad core laptop totally offline. And once that happens, all such a system would need is the correct tooling on top of the AI model "brain" to make it usable.

And beyond that, what if you could have an AI model on an ASIC-style add-in card? Where's their moat then?

Don't forget about Macs. Top models can run even fairly large LLMs (although time to first token is... not great). But even midline can certainly run LLMs in the ballpark of ~30B params very well, which is where things start to get interesting IMO.

> although time to first token is... not great

The token cache works on CUDA too. So yeah, the initial loadout sucks, but almost everything from then on is solid.

This works for scenarios like a simple chat. But the moment you start throwing large documents on it, or lots of code, it's back to waiting.

I'd say their DX is way better compared to the competition. The playground, tooling, and web experience with documentation is far superior to the competition (even tho it has issues sometimes). User experience is key in a sea of the same shit.

I mean you could say the same about a Macbook or iPhone/iPad, but for the actual people (not HN users lol) out there, they vastly prefer Apple to HP, Dell, etc. Due to their wallet some can't though.

There are literally thousands of other laptops that do the "same thing" (computer for doing shit).

Those who say otherwise are usually broke and know deep down that given proper purchasing power, they too would prefer to use a $3k Macbook Pro than some POS Dell.

Same with android.

Everyone knows it is cope based on PP, it is just in poor taste to actually call it like it is (idc)

Apple had innovative products that they went very heavy in brand based fashion merchandising. In addition they were a legacy brand with a generally favorable reputation and solid recognition. They built a strong moat based on those characteristics and finally hit the mass market non-tech target demographic with the most widely used emerging technology since the personal vehicle. Apple did this while successfully merging a hardware, software, and marketplace platform. OpenAI has some interesting software but has an incredibly long way to run and extremely unlikely path to becoming anything like Apple. Not only that, they are in a market that a lot of the general population finds questionably valuable if not outright unappealing.

Apple was not an overnight success

OpenAI is dynamic for consumer apps. Anthropic seems much better at productizing AI that you can actually build with, while also catering to enterprise in their own productized offerings

Also Claude Opus 4.1 runs multidimensional circles around GPT-5 in my view. The only better use case for GPT-5 is when you need it to scrape the web for data

Too bad Anthropic fucks over their 20x max subscribers. Their whole opus usage limit bullshit in favor of sonnet 4.5 which is objectively worse regardless of whatever they say. They clearly want to save money and take our $200.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/8449

I hope they get destroyed in the AI race.

FWIW I don't disagree

Interesting, so it's not just me who's finding Gemini 2.5 Pro to be the quiet leader? Deep Research also seems to be better in it, and the limits for that are far more generous to boot (20 per day on Gemini!).

Makes one wonder if Google will eventually sweep this field.

I don’t think they will get any moat. I might be wrong on this of course, but I don’t see a killer feature for these stochastic parrots that can’t be easily replicated

> … stochastic parrots… What a wonderful phrase, mind if I borrow it?

It's commonly used at this point, for what it's worth

"the term stochastic parrot is a metaphor, introduced by Emily M. Bender and colleagues in a 2021 paper, that frames large language models as systems that statistically mimic text without real understanding"

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Never mind the phrase. If your parrot can compete in international math and programming competitions at the gold-medal level and make entire subreddits fail the Turing test, I would like to borrow your parrot.

you don't have to get permission

plus, they didn't come up with it

Actually, Anthrophic has a Mac app I can use, and I cannot use the OpenAI one.

Fun fact, it’s an Electron app

The irony of Claude being pretty good at writing Swift code.

Yeah, and it works great on my Intel Mac. The OpenAI app doesn't work at all.

So guess which app I prefer. That's the argument for Electron, and it is a good one.

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