Comment by aylmao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aylmao | Hacker News Reader

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> Additionally, the other thing I think OpenAI leads in is Product. Google is amazing at creating technologies and awful at creating products. I think OpenAI can be positioned to win based off of that alone.

I agree that Google isn't great at creating products anymore, but I'm not sure that OpenAI is. We've seen relatively simple products by them (a chat app, a short-form video app, various web interfaces) but we haven't seen anything as complex as some of Google's bigger products (Gmail, Docs, Maps, etc).

If OpenAI hits jackpot with a "simple" product, it could be easily replicated by a bigger company in the way Meta quickly copied Stories from Snapchat or TikTok to make Reels. It's already happened with Chat; the LLM is hard to compete against but the actual product, a web/app chat interface, was quickly copied by other companies with LLMs.

OpenAI would need to make something very complex and hard to copy to give it a solid head start they could really build a moat around— something like Google Maps, which took Apple years to replicate (and other companies won't even try to) or the iPhone, which was years ahead at launch. I just don't think we've seen OpenAI prove it has the capacity to build a product like that yet.

>If OpenAI hits jackpot with a "simple" product, it could be easily replicated by a bigger company in the way Meta quickly copied Stories from Snapchat or TikTok to make Reels. It's already happened with Chat; the LLM is hard to compete against but the actual product, a web/app chat interface, was quickly copied by other companies with LLMs.

IG reels never became as popular as Tiktok and did basically nothing nothing to peel users away from Tiktok. For a long time, it was a meme that IG reels were just copy pasted tiktok content. Similarly, Meta's LLMs are used so little they honestly don't even register, despite being stuffed into everything they own, apps with billions and billions of users. Gemini is doing well but it's still a very very distant 2nd, despite being automatically downloaded and nudged in android phones, a platform with billions of users. Microsoft is by far the biggest player in consumer laptops, with edge and bing being the default options. So why can't they come even close to chrome and google ?

Time and time again, we've been shown. You can copy all you want, you can even shove it into the faces of your billions of users and find use for it. Doesn't mean you'll beat the market leader. You'll rarely beat market leaders just by copying them.

ChatGPT is the 5th most visited site on the planet. No other Consumer LLM service is remotely close, regardless of how many billions of users the entrenched players are shoving their copies into.

> Time and time again, we've been shown. You can copy all you want, you can even shove it into the faces of your billions of users and find use for it. Doesn't mean you'll beat the market leader.

Except this is not true.

Microsoft became the biggest company in the world with this strategy. Most famoulsy, Windows was a copy of MacOS, and Internet Explorer (which became so dominant it took Microsoft to court) of Netscape. Android copied iOS and became bigger than it. Again, Instagram famously copied Stories from Snapchat, and quickly took over [2]. There's many examples of a bigger company copying smaller ones and using their distribution or ecosystems to win.

> Microsoft is by far the biggest player in consumer laptops, with edge and bing being the default options. So why can't they come even close to chrome and google?

I don't know if you're perhaps too young or too new to the industry to know about the browser wars and the Microsoft anti-trust case, but if Microsoft pulled all the stops it once upon a time did, it would. It so happens Google is has an infinite money machine too though, and can pour many millions in the courts if Microsoft were to try.

> You'll rarely beat market leaders just by copying them.

Let me correct this sentence for you. You'll rarely beat the big companies by copying them, but the big companies can easily beat you by copying you. OpenAI might seem big, but it hasn't found its infinite money machine yet.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomward/2017/05/03/oh-snap-inst...

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