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SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race. We're at peak valuation and he needs to convert something now. If the entrenched giants (Google, Microsof
by jjani 1y ago
SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race. We're at peak valuation and he needs to convert something now.
If the entrenched giants (Google, Microsoft and Apple) catch up - and Google 100% has, if not surpassed - they have a thousand levers to pull and OpenAI is done for. Microsoft has realized this, hence why they're breaking up with them - Google and Anthropic have shown they don't need OpenAI. Galaxy phones will get a Gemini button, Chrome will get it built into the browser. MS can either develop their own thing , use opensource models, or just ask every frontier model provider (and there's already 3-4 as we speak) how cheaply they're willing to deliver. Then chuck it right in the OS and Office first-class. Which half the white collar world spends their entire day staring at. Apple devices too will get an AI button (or gesture, given it's Apple) and just like MS they'll do it inhouse or have the providers bid against each other.
The only way OpenAI David was ever going to beat the Goliaths GMA in the long run was if it were near-impossible to catch up to them, á la TSMC/ASML. But they did catch up.
- parliament32 1y agoAgreed on Google dominance. Gemini models from this year are significantly more helpful than anything from OAI.. and they're being handed out for free to anyone with a Google account.
- tedivm 1y agoEven Alibaba is releasing some amazing models these days. Qwen 3 is pretty remarkable, especially considering the variety of hardware the variants of it can run on.
- pi-err 1y agoSounds a lot like "Google+ will catch Facebook in no time". OpenAI has been on a winning streak that makes ChatGPT the default chatbot for most of the planet. Everybody else like you describe is trying to add some AI crap behind a button on a congested UI. B2B market will stay open but OpenAI has certainly not peaked yet.
- kortilla 1y agoMost of the planet doesn’t use chat bots at all.
- no_wizard 1y agoFacebook had immense network effects working for it back then. What network effect does OpenAI have? Far as I can tell, moving from OpenAI to Gemini or something else is easy. It’s not sticky at all. There’s no “my friends are primarily using OpenAI so I am too” or anything like that. So again, I ask, what makes it sticky?
- jwarden 1y agoBrand counts for a lot
- fs111 1y agoGoogle is one of the most valuable brands ever. Everyone knows it. It is even used for "searching the web" openai is not that strong of a brand
- schlch 1y agoI think for the general public ChatGPT is a much stronger brand than OpenAI itself.
- asadotzler 1y agoGoogle is a far bigger brand than ChatGPT and OpenAI combined.
- msabalau 1y agoNo one has a deep emotional connection with OpenAI that would impede switching. At best they have a bit of cheap tribalism that might prevent some incurious people who don't care much about using the best tools noticing that they aren't.
- grey-area 1y agoWell I think you’re correct that they know the jig is up, but I would say they know the AI bubble is about to burst so they want to cash out before that happens. There is little to no money to be made in GAI, it will never turn into AGI, and people like Altman know this, so now they’re looking for a greater fool before it is too late.
- Jefro118 1y agoThey made $4 billion last year, not really "little to no money". I agree it's not clear they can justify their valuation but it's certainly not a bubble.
- mandevil 1y agoBut didn't they spend $9 billion? If I have a machine that magically turns $9 billion of investor money into $4 billion in revenue, I need to have a pretty awesome story for how in the future I am going to be making enormous piles of money to pay back that investment. If it looks like frontier models are going to be a commodity and it is not going to be winner-take-all... that's a lot harder story to tell.
- BosunoB 1y agoMost of that 9 billion was spent on training new models and on staff. If they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable.
- PeterStuer 1y agoBut only if everyone else stopped improving models as well. In this niche you can be irrellevant in months when your models drop behind.
- ezekg 1y agoSays literally every startup ever i.r.t. R&D/marketing/ad spend yet that's rarely reality.
- nfRfqX5n 1y agoask 10 people on the street about chatgpt or gemini and see which one they know
- kranke155 1y agothats just brand recognition. The fact that people know Coca Cola doesnt mean they drink it.
- blueprint 1y agoor that they would drink it if a well designed, delicious, but no HFCS nor sugar alternative were marketed with funding
- All4All 1y agoBut whether the competition will emerge as Pepsi or as RC-Cola is still tbd.
- jimbokun 1y agoIt doesn’t? That name recognition made Coca Cola into a very successful global corporation.
- asadotzler 1y agoAbout 95% of people know the Coca Cola brand, about 70% of soda drinkers in the US drink one of its sodas, and about 40% of all people in the US drink it. Knowing and using are not the same thing.
- jimbokun 1y agoYour numbers indicate to me their name recognition drives a big part of their value. 40% of the US is a huge customer base.
- postalrat 1y agoNow switch chatgpt and gemini on them and see if they notice.
- crorella 1y agoBut he said he was doing it just for love!! [1] 1: https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-subcommittee-hearing-on-oversight-of-ai/#:~:text=I'm%20doing%20this%20cuz%20I%20love%20it. https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-sub...
- jstummbillig 1y ago[flagged]
- MrDarcy 1y agoAnd yet the analysis is spot on. Gemini and Claude are both clearly better, today.
- blueprint 1y agothere are plenty of things that I simply cannot use Gemini for
- jjani 1y agoVery curious - what is it besides image generation?
- dom96 1y agoI asked Gemini today to replace the background of a very simple logo and it refused. ChatGPT did it no problem (though it did take a long time because apparently lots of people were doing image generation). I guess Gemini just refused because of a poor filter for sensitive content. But still, it was annoying.
- jjani 1y agoCome on, at least provide your argument, we're curious! I've brought the bear case, so what's your bull case? :)
- sp527 1y agoLiterally the founder of Y Combinator all but outright called Sam Altman a conniving dickbag. That’s the consensus view advanced by the very man who made him.
- reasonableklout 1y agoThis seems like misinformation, are you talking about how Sam left YC after OpenAI took off? What PG said was "we didn't want him to leave, just to choose one or the other"[1]. [1]: https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940 https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fooker 1y agoGoogle is pretty far behind. They have random one off demos and they beat benchmarks yes, but try to use Google’s AI stuff for real work and it falls apart really fast.
- adastra22 1y agoPeople are using Gemini for real work. I prefer Claude myself, but Gemini is as good (or alternatively: as bad) as OpenAI’s models. The only thing OpenAI has right now is the ChatGPT name, which has become THE word for modern LLMs among lay people.
- celdon25 1y agoDefine “real work”
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- reasonableklout 1y agoThat's not what early adopter numbers are showing. Even the poll from r/openai a few days ago show Gemini 2.5 with nearly 3x more votes than o3 (and far beyond Claude): https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1k67bya/what_is_currently_the_best_ai_model/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1k67bya/what_is_cur... Anecdotally, I've switched to Gemini as my daily driver for complex coding tasks. I prefer Claude's cleaner code, but it is less capable at difficult problems, and Anthropic's servers are unreliable.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- caseyy 1y agoIt's doubtful if there even is a race anymore. The last significant AI advancement in the consumer LLM space was fluent human language synthesis around 2020, with its following assistant/chat interface. Since then, everything has been incremental — larger models, new ways to prompt them, cheaper ways to run them, more human feedback, and gaming evaluations. The wisest move in the chatbot business might be to wait and see if anyone discovers anything profitable before spending more effort and wasting more money on chat R&D, which includes most agentic stuff. Reliable assistants or something along those lines might be the next big breakthrough (if you ask certain futurologists), but the technology we have seems unsuitable for any provable reliability. ML can be applied in a thousand ways other than LLMs, and many will positively impact our lives and create their own markets. But OpenAI is not in that business. I think the writing is on the wall, and Sama's vocal fry, "AGI is close," and humanity verification crypto coins are smoke and mirrors.
- roflmaostc 1y agoJust to get things right. The big AI LLM hype started end of 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, .... Most people in society connect AI directly to ChatGPT and hence OpenAI. And there has been a lot of progress in image generation, video generation, ... So I think your timeline and views are slightly off.
- caseyy 1y ago> Just to get things right. The big AI LLM hype started end of 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, .... GPT-2 was released in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. I'd say 2020 is significant because that's when people seriously considered the Turing test passed reliably for the first time. But for the sake of this argument, it hardly matters what date years back we choose. There's been enough time since then to see the plateau. > Most people in society connect AI directly to ChatGPT and hence OpenAI. I'd double-check that assumption. Many people I've spoken to take a moment to remember that "AI" stands for artificial intelligence. Outside of tongue-in-cheek jokes, OpenAI has about 50% market share in LLMs, but you can't forget that Samsung makes AI washing machines, let alone all the purely fraudulent uses of the "AI" label. > And there has been a lot of progress in image generation, video generation, ... These are entirely different architectures from LLM/chat though. But you're right that OpenAI does that, too. When I said that they don't stray much from chat, I was thinking more about AlexNet and the broad applications of ML in general. But you're right, OpenAI also did/does diffusion, GANs, transformer vision. This doesn't change my views much on chat being "not seeing the forest for the trees" though. In the big picture, I think there aren't many hockey sticks/exponentials left in LLMs to discover. That is not true about other AI/ML.
- moralestapia 1y agoSorry but perhaps you haven't looked at the actual numbers. Market share of OpenAI is like 90%+.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Market share of OpenAI is like 90%+ Source? I've seen 10 to 20% [1][2]. [1] https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-companies/ https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-companies/ [2] https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/openai-statistics.html https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/openai-statistics....
- moralestapia 1y agoHmm ... I probably need to clarify what I'm talking about, so that peeps like @JumpCrisscross can get a better grasp of it. I do not mean the total market share of the category of businesses that could be labeled as "AI companies", like Microsoft or NVIDIA, on your first link. I will not talk about your second link because it does not seem to make sense within the context of this conversation (zero mentions or references to market share). What I mean is: * The main product that OpenAI sells is AI models (GPT-4o, etc...) * OpenAI does not make hardware. OpenAI is not in the business of cloud infrastructure. OpenAI is not in the business of selling smartphones. A comparison between OpenAI and any of those companies would only make sense for someone with a very casual understanding of this topic. I can think of someone, perhaps, who only used ChatGPT a couple times and inferred it was made by Apple because it was there on its phone. This discussion calls for a deeper understanding of what OpenAI is. * Other examples of companies that sell their own AI models, and thus compete directly with OpenAI in the same market that OpenAI operates by taking a look at their products and services, are Anthropic (w/ Claude), Google (w/ Gemini) and some others ones like Meta and Mistral with open models. * All those companies/models, together, make up some market that you can put any name you want to it (The AI Model Market TM) That is the market I'm talking about, and that is the one that I estimated to be 90%+ which was pretty much on point, as usual :). 1: https://gs.statcounter.com/ai-chatbot-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/ai-chatbot-market-share 2: https://www.ctol.digital/news/latest-llm-market-share-mar-2024-chatgpt-leads-gemini-surges-and-claude-triples/ https://www.ctol.digital/news/latest-llm-market-share-mar-20...
- charlieyu1 1y agoat least 6-9 months too late
- lossolo 1y ago> SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race. OpenAI trained GPT-4.1 and 4.5—both originally intended to be GPT-5 but they were considered disappointments, which is why they were named differently. Did they really believe that scaling the number of parameters would continue indefinitely without diminishing returns? Not only is there no moat, but there's also no reasonable path forward with this architecture for an actual breakthrough.
- laser 1y agoMakes for a good underdog story! But OpenAI is dominating and will continue to do so. They have the je ne sais quoi. It’s therefore laborious to speak to it, but it manifests in self-reinforcing flywheels of talent, capital, aesthetic, popular consciousness, and so forth. But hey, Bing still makes Microsoft billions a year, so there will be other winners. Underestimating focused breakout leaders in new rapidly growing markets is as cliche as those breakouts ultimately succeeding, so even if we go into an AI winter it’s clear who comes out on top the other side. A product has never been adopted this quickly, ever. AGI or not, skepticism that merely points to conventional resource imbalances misses the big picture and such opinions age poorly. Doesn’t have to be obvious only in hindsight if you actually examine the current record of disruptive innovation.