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Comment by qnleigh | Hacker News Reader

Maybe there's no tangible moat still, but did Gemini 3's exceptional performance actually funnel users away from ChatGPT? The typical Hacker News reader might be aware of its good performance on benchmarks, but did this convert a significant number of ChatGPT users to Gemini? It's not obvious to me either way.

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Definitely. The fact that they inject it into Google Search means that even fewer people who have never used ChatGPT or just used it as a "smarter" Google search will just directly try the search function. It is terrible for actually detailed information i.e. debugging errors, but for summarizing basic searches that would have taken 2-3 clicks on the results is handled directly after the search. I feel bad for the website hosts who actually want visitors instead of visibility.

Anecdotally yes. Since launch I’ve observed probably 50% of the folks that were “ChatGPT those that” all the time suddenly talking about Gemini non-stop. The more that gets rolled into Google’s platform the more there’s point to using separate tooling from OpenAI. There’s a reason Sam is calling this “code red.”

Interesting. And these people weren't mostly techies? My impression has been that the further someone is from tech, the more likely they are to think that ChatGPT is synonymous with LLMs.

I'm seeing it outside of techies. My dad told me "AI Google said that..."

I've had sales clerks at stores say that when I asked basic questions about their products, including questions about subscription pricing.

Mostly non-techies which surprised me. Like borderline tech illiterate folks talking about Gemini which really surprised me too. I can see why OpenAI is freaking out. They’ve massively overextended themselves financially, and if the base starts to slip even just a bit they’re in big trouble.

> My impression has been that the further someone is from tech, the more likely they are to think that ChatGPT is synonymous with LLMs.

This is still sorta true, but swap "LLM" for "chatbot." I mentor high school kids, and a lot of them use ChatGPT. A lot of them use AI summaries from Google Search. None of them use gemini.google.com.

They integrated it into Google search immediately so I think a lot of people will bother less with ChatGPT when a google search is just as effective.

I think the theory is if you get to that point, it's already over.

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