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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

> But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.

Brand recognition doesn't mean a thing when it comes to a technically-illiterate audience with no control over their digital lives. In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo", everyone who gets served an LLM-generated response straight from their OS and/or browser courtesy of Google, Apple, or Microsoft will call that a "ChatGPT", and OpenAI will be powerless to stop the platform holders from intercepting their traffic.

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Hard disagree. If anything brand recognition is more important for technically illiterate.

> In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo"

And this proves that point. Nintendo sales in the 1990s crushed the competitors numbers.

...and a decade later they were close to bankruptcy.

Ok? Because of their brand recognition?

Despite

> Hard disagree. If anything brand recognition is more important for technically illiterate.

No, the tech-illiterate gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which just means the platform defaults. OpenAI doesn't control the platform, which means they've already lost to Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Don't build your castle in someone else's kingdom.

> And this proves that point. Nintendo sales in the 1990s crushed the competitors numbers.

Clearly you know nothing about the history of the console business, because Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005, despite Nintendo's brand strength.

> No, the tech-illiterate gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which just means the platform defaults.

The path of least resistance is by way of brand recognition.

> OpenAI doesn't control the platform

OpenAI has 800mm MAUs on their own platform that they control, assuming we trust their reporting. They own chat.com, all of our grandmothers know ChatGPT - they don't know Gemini...I'm not even sure how OpenAI could have lost to Apple or Microsoft in the AI race. Those are nonsensical comparisons.

> Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005

Yes you're right. If we shift the comparison window by a full 50% the numbers do favor Sony.

My point is not that OpenAI is infallible or that a competitor couldn't also be successful. Only that brand recognition is a legitimate and important factor.

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