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Comment by gallerdude | Hacker News Reader

Android has market share, but Apple makes all of the money! I find it really funny when people attribute Apple’s success to “oh, the only reason they succeed is design and marketing.” Yeah, I mean factually speaking design and marketing actually do matter a lot!

Us developer types like to pretend like specs are the only thing that matters? If you could have a 10x more powerful model you could only access running locally through your terminal, versus a weaker model through a clean web interface, normies will pick the web ui every single time. Product experience is simply everything, as much as we like to pretend like nitty technical decisions are the most important thing.

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> If you could have a 10x more powerful model you could only access running locally through your terminal, versus a weaker model through a clean web interface, normies will pick the web ui every single time.

More like if you could have a 1.25x more powerful model that you could only access through some weird surveillance megacorps aggressive monetization scheme, or choose from 100 others running open models and accessible through 100 different interfaces pandering to every taste.

Normies will choose the megacorp every time, because that was the one in the tv commercial, and within six months will have left for one of the others in a rage.

The only corporate hope is that the government steps in to ban their competition.

> Android has market share, but Apple makes all of the money!

So? The benefit of open source is that you don’t have to worry about making a ton of money. You just need to be viable.

Apple: premium product a minority is willing to pay for

Android: standard product the majority use

I’m sure there will continue to be iPhone equivalents in the AI world, premium bespoke models. But the vast majority of people will be happy with a cheaper offering.

The original comment was “open models are what kill OpenAI and Anthropic”, which to me is as silly as saying “Android is what killed Apple”

Well I think a critical difference is that, unlike Apple, OpenAI and Anthropic have taken on so much VC funding that a 20-something % market share is not going to be enough for them. So open models could kill them, not because of the techonology but because of the way they're financed.

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