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Comment by polishTar | Hacker News Reader

That's a bit revisionist. Network effects were obvious when Google acquired Youtube. Google Video had the edge technically, but it didn't matter because Youtube had the users/content and Google saw that very clearly in their user growth before they made their offer.

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I'm not sure about it having the edge, I thought Google video had a worse interface between them at the time. But that point feels eerily relevant anyway: a lot of normal people I see don't care if Claude/Gemini/etc are better models technically, they're comfortable with ChatGPT already.

A lot of YT's growth at the time was word of mouth and brand among the population, which is currently ChatGPT's position.

ChatGPT is losing their brand positioning to Google, Anthropic, and Chinese Open Source

Altman knows this and why he called code red. If OpenAI hasn't produce a fully new model in 1.5 years, how much longer can they hang on before people will turn to alternatives that are technically better? How long before they could feasibly put out a new model if they are having issues in pre-training?

They're losing their benchmark lead to those companies. But no chance that your average user is even aware of Anthropic, much less OSS models. The brand is mostly fine IMO, it's the product that needs to catch up.

You conveniently left out their main competitor, Google, there.

The problem for the brand is that the product is lagging, I've already heard it from people IRL

Their brand is not ok based on what I've heard, certainly no moat

Do you have any proof of this?

Still feels like ChatGPT is synonymous with the current wave of generative ai

Even if they aren’t the market lead and it’s main offering is being commodified

Maybe ChatGPT is sticky enough that people won't switch. But since we're talking about something as old as Google Video, we could also talk about AltaVista, which was "good enough" until people discovered a better and more useful alternative.

A lot of "normal people" are learning fast about ChatGPT alternatives now. Gemini in particular is getting a lot of mainstream buzz. Things like this [1] with 14k likes are happening everyday on social. Marc Benioff's love for Gemini broke through into the mainstream also.

[1] https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1995900344224907500 [2] https://x.com/Benioff/status/1992726929204760661

This is why Anthropic is likely the Netscape of this era. Not OpenAI

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