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Comment by morkalork | Hacker News Reader

I commute on the train, I see students studying with it. I go for brunch on the weekend, I see parents consulting it while at the table with their infants. I'm at work, colleagues are using it all day. I leave work and I overhear the random woman smoking in the alleyway talking on her cellphone saying "so I asked chatgpt". It's mind-bogglingly pervasive, the last time something had such a seizmic cultural impact like this was I dunno, Facebook? And secondly, it's all one specific brand. I'm not encountering co-pilot or gemini in the meat-space.

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Chatgpt is like "Jeep". My grandmother calls every suv a jeep. But they're not all jeeps. AI looks like chatgpt, but people are driving all sorts of different AIs.

I would guess OAI has no moat or stickiness beyond what governments and private companies will do to keep it afloat through equity and circular financing. Good enough AI is all most need, and they need it at the cheapest cost basis possible with the most convenient access.

Google will probably win on most of these fronts unless a coalition is formed to actively fight google at the business/government level. But, absent that, it will win out over oai and oai will probably bleed to death trying to become profitable.. whenever that happens. You'll likely see their talent and corresponding salaries shrink massively along this journey.

And if you're Boris Johnson, it's pronounced like 'jeep' too!

My sister uses Gemini and calls it chat gpt. It's becoming a genericide.

I still think it's hilarious that a product name as awful as "ChatGPT" has become so ubiquitous.

I wonder what percentage of its users know what the GPT stands for, or even thought about it for a second?

I mean, how is it any worse than 'google'?

chatgpt is generic (as in, no prior meaning attached, except for the few people in the world who understand what GPT stands for). It's simple - even a non-english speaker can say it easily, and doesn't require one to be native to know how to pronounce it (this is a difficult concept for a native english speaker to grok).

These features makes for a good name.

"Google" at least doesn't have an acronym for "Generative pre-trained transformer" baked into it.

Even you agreed that almost nobody knows what GPT stands for - which means it's as random as any other three letter acronyms.

So i argue that chatGPT is indeed a good name (as good as google was).

And many people don't know what Google stands for. Just like they probably didn't care what AOL stands for, or MSN

Car brands are like that, does the average person know or care what GT, RX, STI, WRX etc mean?

I think car names like that are awful too.

(Clearly the car marketing world and the general public disagree with me there.)

It's very weird to pronounce it as a French. Either you pronounce it like in English with a thick French accent like "tchat' djee-pee-tee" or like in French as "tchat' jay-pey-tey" which sounds exactly like "I farted". This is really a terrible name in French.

while we're talking pronunciation I'm on an (entirely pointless) one man mission to have "lemon" stick as a pronunciation of "LLM".

My aunt calls it "chat", "I asked chat", which is funny to my online-brain. Like she's a streamer with a permanent audience of 1. Hey chat, is this real?^1

1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/chat-is-this-real

OpenAIs investors can look forward to having an operating margin as impressive as the company that produces Band-Aid

How many of those people are paying? I think many say “use ChatGPT” to mean any LLM. As you noted it seems you just see ChatGPT in the wild but that is anecdotal. It is certainly pervasive right now. But I know a lot of people currently switching to Gemini.

I personally prefer claude models for all my work. If I were them I would be very worried. They are never giving us AGI and I am skeptical they are worth .5 trillion. Their cash burn is insane. Once ads and price hikes come, people will migrate to companies that can still afford to subsidize (like Google).

Plus I heard they lowered projections recently? Sam honestly comes off as a grifter.

I actually encountered this today - one of a group I am planning a trip with posted some of the breathless nonsense that ChatGPT produced ("you're not picking a hotel, you're picking a group dynamic..." and other such textual diarrhea).

It turned out the only reason ChatGPT was because it is free for small enough volume usage. My suggestion to see what Claude had to say instead was met with "huh, you have to pay for it?". It's not like these are people that can't afford $20 per month for a subscription, but it might be that these assistants aren't even worth that for typical "normie" use cases.

Is it anecdotal? The observation isn't _my_ experience using it, or of _my friends_. I have no influence over who I see in public using it. I know it's not exactly a scientific study but it's still pretty damn good as a random sample. If I went outside and saw the sky was dark, cloudy and my face got wet, would you tell me it was anecdotal evidence when I say it's raining out?

Only if you said it was raining everywhere these days.

I'm very similar to the OP here, always hear about ChatGPT rarely anything else. Most people are definitely not paying, but of the few that are paying, outside of software developers, they are all paying for ChatGPT exclusively. I don't know of anyone paying for the basic chat versions of other AIs. A few developers paying for Claude and Gemini, but I know hundreds of people that talk of ChatGPT and no other AI, again most not paying though.

Outside of work I don't know anyone who pays for AI.

But I have noticed that everyone seems to be using ChatGPT as the generic term for AI. They will google something and then refer to the Gemini summary as "ChatGPT says...". I tried to find out what model/version one of my friends was using when he was talking about ChatGPT and it was "the free one that comes with Android"... So Gemini.

Gemini is nearly unusable thanks to “subsidies”. I honestly don’t see what the path is to these companies making any money short of massive price hikes, or electricity suddenly becoming free.

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