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Comment by an0malous | Hacker News Reader

All of Sam’s shenanigans go back to that one popular post on here many months ago about how AI has no moat. LLMs are a commodity, Chinese companies are just releasing them for free. Sam has gone all in on OpenAI and needs to secure his company, he knows it could be another decade until they discover an innovation on par with tranformers and there’s absolutely no way they can go from burning tens of billions of dollars a year to profitable by selling a rapidly commoditized technology.

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LLMs are a commodity but ChatGpt is a brand, for most people AI means ChatGpt. They are not going to use Chinese models.

ChatGpt is also building other products/brands like Sora to capture more mindshare.

Linux is free and yet people use Windows.

An operating system is a lot stickier than a website URL.

Google has stayed on top for 25 years because they're better and free. LLM providers will have to compete on price doing expensive inference.

Google stayed on the top because of business deals with Apple and Firefox and then they got the biggest marketing tool called Chrome.

Chatgpt can become an Ad company just like Google probably bigger than Google.

If a foundation model provider allows fine-tuning on confidential data but the result is locked into the platform, wouldn't that be extremely sticky?

All this transformer tech is a commodity, no one will care about the brand if an alternative is free so it’s a race to the bottom.

Yes people use Windows. Go look up the history of how that came to be, it had nothing to do with their brand. Sam is looking for his IBM.

I don’t buy this argument about brand, in tech history has showed customers will switch overnight if a better option appears and there is no network effects or ecosystem lockin. BlackBerry had a brand too.

ChatGPT has literally no brand moat. Nobody recognizes, or even cares about, the brand. They care about the interface - chat.

If you just take those chinese models and slap them on some decent looking website, nobody will know the difference. People take brand recognition far too seriously.

If Linux was actually indistinguishable from Windows, you bet your ass nobody in their right mind would install Windows. But they're actually different things.

> LLMs are a commodity but ChatGpt is a brand, for most people AI means ChatGpt. They are not going to use Chinese models.

This is still an unknown.

> Linux is free and yet people use Windows.

The moat isn't even 1% of the one that Windows has - and even Windows has been losing ground on the consumer side. While slow, the rate acceleration is definitely there. Compare Oct 2020-Oct 2025 vs the preceding 5-year period.

Netscape was fairly known by the public during the .com bubble, it's now a distant memory at most.

Yes because MS gave away IE for free, why do you think all AI providers including ChatGpt give AI access for free for limited cases?

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