5 ms·

Their moat in the consumer world is the branding and the fact open ai has 'memory' which you can't migrate to another provider. That means responses can be far

Their moat in the consumer world is the branding and the fact open ai has 'memory' which you can't migrate to another provider. That means responses can be far more tailored - it knows what your job is, knows where you go with friends, knows that when you ask about 'dates' you mean romantic relationships and which ones are going well or badly not the fruit, etc. Eventually when they make it work better, open ai can be your friend and confident, and you wouldn't dump your friend of many years to make another new friend without good reason.

dufir 10mo ago
What kind of a moat is that? I think it only works in abusive relationships, not consumer economies. Is OpenAIs model being an abusive money grubbing partner? I suppose it could be!
- wolfhumble 10mo ago
  If you have all your “stuff” saved on ChatGPT, you’re naturally more likely to stay there, everything else being more or less equal: Your applications, translations, market research . . .
  - jennyholzer3 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - fluidcruft 10mo ago
    I think this is one of the reasons I prefer claude-code and codex. All the files are on my disks and if claude or codex were to disappear nothing is lost.
patrickmcnamara 10mo ago
I really think this memory thing is overstated on Hacker News. This is not something that is hard to move at all. It's not a moat. I don't think most users even know memory exist outside of a single conversation.
- bsimpson 10mo ago
  I dislike that it has a memory. It creeps me out when a past session poisons a current one.
  - fluidcruft 10mo ago
    I agree. For me it's annoying because everything it generates is too tailored to the first stuff I started chatting with it about. I have multiple responsibilities and I haven't been able to get it to compartmentalize. When I'm wearing my "radiology research" support hat it assumes I'm also wearing my "MRI physics" hat and to weaves everything for MRI. It's really annoying.
    - 00deadbeef 10mo ago
      Use project-only memory https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10169521-projects-in-chatgpt#h_374a3efb05 https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10169521-projects-in-cha...
      - fluidcruft 10mo ago
        Thank you! I feel really dumb for not knowing about that!
  - transcriptase 10mo ago
    Exactly. I went through a phase of playing around with ESP32s and now it tries to steer every prompt about anything technology or electronics related back to how it can be used in conjunction with a microcontroller, regardless of how little sense it makes.
  - 00deadbeef 10mo ago
    You can turn it off
  - bandrami 10mo ago
    Agree. Memory is absolutely a misfeature in almost every LLM use case
iknowstuff 10mo ago
I just learned Gemini has "memory" because it mixed its response to a new query with a completely unrelated query I had beforehand, despite making separate chats for them. It responded as if they were the same chat. Garbage.
- jeffbee 10mo ago
  I recently discovered that if a sentence starts with "remember", Gemini writes the rest of it down as standing instructions. Maybe go look in there and see if there is something surprising.
- pests 10mo ago
  Its a recent addition. You can view them in some settings menu. Gemini also has scheduled triggers like "Give me a recap of the daily news every day at 9am based on my interests" and it will start a new chat with you every day at 9am with that content.
afavour 10mo ago
But Google has your Gmail inbox, your photos, your maps location history…
- Ianjit 10mo ago
  I think an OpenAI paper showed 25% of GPT usage is “seeking information”. In that case Google also has a an advantage from being the default search provider on iOS and Android. I do find myself using the address bar in a browser like a chat box. https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f142e/economic-research-chatgpt-usage-paper.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f1...
- no-name-here 10mo ago
  > your maps location history Note that since 2024, Google no longer has your location history on their servers, it's only stored locally: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/06/google-to-start-permanently-deleting-users-location-history https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/06/g...
tootie 10mo ago
It's certainly valuable but you can ask Digg and MySpace how secure being the first mover is. I can already hear my dad telling me he is using Google's ChatGPT...
locknitpicker 10mo ago
> Their moat in the consumer world is the branding and the fact open ai has 'memory' which you can't migrate to another provider. Their 'memory' is mostly unhelpful and gets in the way. At best it saves you from prompting some context, but more often than not it adds so much irrelevant context that it over fits responses so hard that it makes them completely useless, specially in exploratory sessions.
JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
> Their moat in the consumer world is the branding and the fact open ai has 'memory' which you can't migrate to another provider This sounds like first-mover advantage more than a moat.
- keeda 10mo ago
  The memory is definitely sort of a moat. As an example, I'm working on a relatively niche problem in computer vision (small, low-resolution images) and ChatGPT now "knows" this and tailors its responses accordingly. With other chatbots I need to provide this context every time else I get suggestions oriented towards the most common scenarios in the literature, which don't work at all for my use-case. That may seem minor, but it compounds over time and it's surprising how much ChatGPT knows about me now. I asked ChatGPT to roast me again at the end of last year, and I was a bit taken aback that it had even figured out the broader problem I'm working on and the high level approach I'm taking, something I had never explicitly mentioned. In fact, it even nailed some aspects of my personality that were not obvious at all from the chats. I'm not saying it's a deep moat, especially for the less frequent users, but it's there.
  - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > may seem minor, but it compounds over time and it's surprising how much ChatGPT knows about me now I’m not saying it’s minor. And one could argue first-mover advantages are a form of moat. But the advantage is limited to those who have used ChatGPT. For anyone else, it doesn’t apply. That’s different from a moat, which tends to be more fundamental.
    - keeda 10mo ago
      Ah, I guess I've been interpreting "moat" narrowly, such as, keeping your competitors from muscling in on your existing business, e.g. siphoning away your existing users. Makes sense that it applies in the broader sense as well, such as say, protecting the future growth of your business.
  - irishcoffee 10mo ago
mupuff1234 10mo ago
Couldn't you just ask it to write down what it knows about you and copy paste into another provider?
lelanthran 10mo ago
> Their moat in the consumer world is the branding and the fact open ai has 'memory' which you can't migrate to another provider. Branding isn't a moat when, as far as the mass market is concerned, you are 2 years old. Branding is a moat when you're IBM, Microsoft (and more recently) Google, Meta, etc.
thenanyu 10mo ago
You can prompt the model to dump all of the memory into a text file and import that. In the onboarding flow, I can ask you, "Do you use another LLM?" If so, give it this prompt and then give me the memory file that outputs.

dufir 10mo ago

What kind of a moat is that? I think it only works in abusive relationships, not consumer economies. Is OpenAIs model being an abusive money grubbing partner? I suppose it could be!

wolfhumble 10mo ago
If you have all your “stuff” saved on ChatGPT, you’re naturally more likely to stay there, everything else being more or less equal: Your applications, translations, market research . . .
- jennyholzer3 10mo ago
  [dead]
- fluidcruft 10mo ago
  I think this is one of the reasons I prefer claude-code and codex. All the files are on my disks and if claude or codex were to disappear nothing is lost.

patrickmcnamara 10mo ago

I really think this memory thing is overstated on Hacker News. This is not something that is hard to move at all. It's not a moat. I don't think most users even know memory exist outside of a single conversation.

bsimpson 10mo ago
I dislike that it has a memory. It creeps me out when a past session poisons a current one.
- fluidcruft 10mo ago
  I agree. For me it's annoying because everything it generates is too tailored to the first stuff I started chatting with it about. I have multiple responsibilities and I haven't been able to get it to compartmentalize. When I'm wearing my "radiology research" support hat it assumes I'm also wearing my "MRI physics" hat and to weaves everything for MRI. It's really annoying.
  - 00deadbeef 10mo ago
    Use project-only memory https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10169521-projects-in-chatgpt#h_374a3efb05 https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10169521-projects-in-cha...
    - fluidcruft 10mo ago
      Thank you! I feel really dumb for not knowing about that!
- transcriptase 10mo ago
  Exactly. I went through a phase of playing around with ESP32s and now it tries to steer every prompt about anything technology or electronics related back to how it can be used in conjunction with a microcontroller, regardless of how little sense it makes.
- 00deadbeef 10mo ago
  You can turn it off
- bandrami 10mo ago
  Agree. Memory is absolutely a misfeature in almost every LLM use case

iknowstuff 10mo ago

I just learned Gemini has "memory" because it mixed its response to a new query with a completely unrelated query I had beforehand, despite making separate chats for them. It responded as if they were the same chat. Garbage.

jeffbee 10mo ago
I recently discovered that if a sentence starts with "remember", Gemini writes the rest of it down as standing instructions. Maybe go look in there and see if there is something surprising.
pests 10mo ago
Its a recent addition. You can view them in some settings menu. Gemini also has scheduled triggers like "Give me a recap of the daily news every day at 9am based on my interests" and it will start a new chat with you every day at 9am with that content.

afavour 10mo ago

But Google has your Gmail inbox, your photos, your maps location history…

Ianjit 10mo ago
I think an OpenAI paper showed 25% of GPT usage is “seeking information”. In that case Google also has a an advantage from being the default search provider on iOS and Android. I do find myself using the address bar in a browser like a chat box. https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f142e/economic-research-chatgpt-usage-paper.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f1...
no-name-here 10mo ago
> your maps location history Note that since 2024, Google no longer has your location history on their servers, it's only stored locally: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/06/google-to-start-permanently-deleting-users-location-history https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/06/g...

tootie 10mo ago

It's certainly valuable but you can ask Digg and MySpace how secure being the first mover is. I can already hear my dad telling me he is using Google's ChatGPT...

locknitpicker 10mo ago

> Their moat in the consumer world is the branding and the fact open ai has 'memory' which you can't migrate to another provider. Their 'memory' is mostly unhelpful and gets in the way. At best it saves you from prompting some context, but more often than not it adds so much irrelevant context that it over fits responses so hard that it makes them completely useless, specially in exploratory sessions.

JumpCrisscross 10mo ago

> Their moat in the consumer world is the branding and the fact open ai has 'memory' which you can't migrate to another provider This sounds like first-mover advantage more than a moat.

keeda 10mo ago
The memory is definitely sort of a moat. As an example, I'm working on a relatively niche problem in computer vision (small, low-resolution images) and ChatGPT now "knows" this and tailors its responses accordingly. With other chatbots I need to provide this context every time else I get suggestions oriented towards the most common scenarios in the literature, which don't work at all for my use-case. That may seem minor, but it compounds over time and it's surprising how much ChatGPT knows about me now. I asked ChatGPT to roast me again at the end of last year, and I was a bit taken aback that it had even figured out the broader problem I'm working on and the high level approach I'm taking, something I had never explicitly mentioned. In fact, it even nailed some aspects of my personality that were not obvious at all from the chats. I'm not saying it's a deep moat, especially for the less frequent users, but it's there.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  > may seem minor, but it compounds over time and it's surprising how much ChatGPT knows about me now I’m not saying it’s minor. And one could argue first-mover advantages are a form of moat. But the advantage is limited to those who have used ChatGPT. For anyone else, it doesn’t apply. That’s different from a moat, which tends to be more fundamental.
  - keeda 10mo ago
    Ah, I guess I've been interpreting "moat" narrowly, such as, keeping your competitors from muscling in on your existing business, e.g. siphoning away your existing users. Makes sense that it applies in the broader sense as well, such as say, protecting the future growth of your business.
- irishcoffee 10mo ago

mupuff1234 10mo ago

Couldn't you just ask it to write down what it knows about you and copy paste into another provider?

lelanthran 10mo ago

> Their moat in the consumer world is the branding and the fact open ai has 'memory' which you can't migrate to another provider. Branding isn't a moat when, as far as the mass market is concerned, you are 2 years old. Branding is a moat when you're IBM, Microsoft (and more recently) Google, Meta, etc.

thenanyu 10mo ago

You can prompt the model to dump all of the memory into a text file and import that. In the onboarding flow, I can ask you, "Do you use another LLM?" If so, give it this prompt and then give me the memory file that outputs.