18 ms·

Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. My

• pm90 8mo ago
  > My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. Ads might change that. If we know anything, nobody beats Google with ad based monetization. OAI is absolutely correct to be scared.
• morkalork 8mo ago
  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.
  • goolz 8mo ago
    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.
    • jen20 8mo ago
      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.
    • morkalork 8mo ago
      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?
      • BreakingProd 8mo ago
        Only if you said it was raining everywhere these days.
    • hattmall 8mo ago
      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.
      • chillfox 8mo ago
        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.
  • boxedemp 8mo ago
    My sister uses Gemini and calls it chat gpt. It's becoming a genericide.
    • simonw 8mo ago
      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?
      • chii 8mo ago
        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.
        • simonw 8mo ago
          "Google" at least doesn't have an acronym for "Generative pre-trained transformer" baked into it.
          • chii 8mo ago
            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).
          • akkad33 8mo ago
            And many people don't know what Google stands for. Just like they probably didn't care what AOL stands for, or MSN
          • morkalork 8mo ago
            Car brands are like that, does the average person know or care what GT, RX, STI, WRX etc mean?
  • SecretDreams 8mo ago
    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.
    • esafak 8mo ago
      And if you're Boris Johnson, it's pronounced like 'jeep' too!
• foogazi 8mo ago
  My wife uses Google AI overview - as an extension of search - on a daily basis and then jumps to Gemini
  • tonfa 8mo ago
    How do you jump to Gemini from AIO? (I know there's AI mode, but it's separate from the Gemini chat product afaik -- except maybe sharing some model lineage)
• CharlesW 8mo ago
  > Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. I think you're underestimating how fickle consumers are, and how much their choices are based on fashion and emotion. A couple more of these, and OpenAI will find itself relegated to the kids' table with Grok and Perplexity. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/15/1121900/gpt4o-grief-ai-companion/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/15/1121900/gpt4o-gr...
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • jcbrand 8mo ago
    I still use perplexity. Which tool is better currently?
    • harambae 8mo ago
      I’m also unclear on what’s better than perplexity if you want accurate information (and not just to write Harry Potter fan fiction or whatever) I finally switched off ChatGPT premium when I asked a simple question (“which terminal is this airline”) and it was so confidently wrong. Perplexity referencing sources and trying to double check accuracy is great IMO.
      • codethief 8mo ago
        Weird. I have used Perplexity various times over the years and every single time it was confidently wrong about a good 50% of what it was saying. In particular, it would cite references that said the exact opposite of what it claimed they said, or references that had nothing to do with the topic at hand and were only tangentially related, etc. My coworkers have reported the same, so it's definitely not just me. In short, I really don't know where Perplexity's reputation of "being accurate" comes from. It's anything but.
• SecretDreams 8mo ago
  How much is your wife paying for the privilege to use OAI presently?
  • gadflyinyoureye 8mo ago
    This is the real question. Is she willing to pay $20 per month when Google's Gemini is free? Google can remain irrational longer than OAI can remain solvent.
    • smugma 8mo ago
      I understand the underlying quote but not how/why it’s being used here. How is Google giving Gemini away for free to undercut OAI irrational? Anticompetitive, maybe.
      • SecretDreams 8mo ago
        Agree. And we don't even know if they're bleeding out doing it. Google is on more efficient hardware and they fully control their ecosystem. And that ecosystem can feed into and be fed by their other ecosystems. OAI just has LLMs.
      • fc417fc802 8mo ago
        Because the quote is irrational/solvent so you have to stick with those words. The similarity is a failed attempt to wait out a disadvantageous price regardless of the specific reason driving said price. Even in the context of the original quote the price is only "irrational" in the eyes of the person trying (and failing) to play the market. "But you can't do that, that doesn't make any sense!" spoken by a person who has failed to fully grasp the situation.
      • svnt 8mo ago
        It is just Google’s business model, and why OpenAI has to do ads better faster. But you can bet there was more economic foresight going on at Google than OpenAI.
    • casualscience 8mo ago
• lll-o-lll 8mo ago
  > people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. I just asked it to build me a searchable indexed downloaded version of all my conversations. One shot, one html page, everything exported (json files). I’m sure I could ask Claude to import it. I don’t see the moat.
  • bdangubic 8mo ago
    there is no moat also because conversation history is useless. like saying “I cant move to DDG cause Google has my search history”
    • bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
      https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity it's not useless, although it used to be more useful than it is now.
  • ziznznzb 8mo ago
    How do you know all your conversations are in there? Honest question I have this issue a lot with AI claims. Nobody verifies the output.
    • simonw 8mo ago
      So far I've not seen anyone complain that their conversations have gone missing. There's a GDPR-style export option that I've used a few times for my own.
    • lll-o-lll 8mo ago
      I did verify the output. You can download your stuff via their api
      • mcny 8mo ago
        Ok so it worked correctly today, for you. How do we know it will continue to do so five years down the road when they are suffocating for cash? The more stuff we have there, the harder it becomes to verify their takeout will have everything.
• keyle 8mo ago
  It would literally take you 5 mins to set up your wife with a competing client for her needs. Sure it's 'sticky' at least a little, but it's not a moat. A moat is a show stopper like they own you.
  • brookst 8mo ago
    Just like it would take 10 seconds to buy her a Pepsi instead of her preferred Coke. Would you?
    • BoredPositron 8mo ago
      Coke doesn't change their recipe every year.
    • kortilla 8mo ago
      No, because that’s a product you buy for flavor and Pepsi is a different flavor.
      • brookst 8mo ago
        UI style and response tone aren’t flavors?
        • anthonypasq 8mo ago
          now youre arguing openAI has a distinctly better product not just that they are hoping for high switching costs
          • brookst 8mo ago
            No, not at all. I am arguing that “distinctly better” isn’t the most important thing in consumer products. Habits, familiarity, and individual taste at far far more important. People just build affinity to products. The vast majority of people buy the same brand toothpaste they grew up with. “Better” isn’t even a consideration.
    • 8mo ago
• thrwaway55 8mo ago
  Isn't half the appeal of AI that they can write a prompt like move all my text history from OpenAI to Claude and then they do it?
  • GCUMstlyHarmls 8mo ago
    But the (royal) Wife needs to 1) know that exporting is a concept, 2) automating an export is possible, 3) you could ask claude to do it, 4) what an API key is or how to connect services. My mum, and probably nearly a billion other users, could probably imagine step 1 but not connect to step 2 beyond copy-paste. Most people are still out here sending screen shots of their phones instead of just copying a link or hitting "share" on the image.
• neya 8mo ago
  OpenAI is already building complex user models. And I mean, super detailed user models - where you are from, what you do, what are your most vulnerable weaknesses, what you care about the most and everything else. This is information even the world's largest advertising company would struggle to put together across their fragmented eco-system (Gmail, Search, etc), but OpenAI has all this on a silver platter. And that scares me, because, a lot of people use ChatGPT as a therapist. We know this because of their advertising intent which they've explicitly expressed. Advertising requires good user models to work (so advertisers can efficiently target their audience) and it is the only way to prove ROI to the advertisers. "But, OpenAI said they won't do targeted ads..". Remember, Google said "Don't be evil" once upon a time too.. That's ok, we use ChatGPT only for coding. We should be good, right? Umm, no. They already explicitly expressed the intention to take a percentage of your revenue if you shipped something with ChatGPT, so even the tech guys aren't safe. "As intelligence moves into scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge. Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created. That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path." "Intelligence will follow the same path." https://openai.com/index/a-business-that-scales-with-the-value-of-intelligence/ https://openai.com/index/a-business-that-scales-with-the-val... So yes, OpenAI has the best chance to win on the consumer side than anyone else. But, that's not necessarily a good thing (and the OpenAI fanboys will hate me for pointing this out).
  • ahtihn 8mo ago
    > They already explicitly expressed the intention to take a percentage of your revenue if you shipped something with ChatGPT, so even the tech guys aren't safe. Wasn't there already a ruling that LLM output is not protected by copyright?
    • neya 8mo ago
      I hope that's the case. That would be really confidence inspiring.
  • biztos 8mo ago
    > Advertising requires good user models to work… …and yet, everywhere I go I see massive advertisements on billboards, the sides of buildings, public transit, movie screens…
• nozzlegear 8mo ago
  Anecdata point: I canceled my ChatGPT pro subscription last year over some shitty thing Altman did at OpenAI and easily moved over to Claude. The only thing I took with me was the system prompt or whatever it's called, I couldn't care less about my conversation history. I'm planning to do the same thing with my Claude subscription if Anthropic kowtows to the Pentagon. These services are not sticky at all IMO.
  • Scrapemist 8mo ago
    Where are you thinking of moving to?
    • nozzlegear 8mo ago
      I'd probably swap to one of the open models available through my DuckDuckGo subscription. I don't keep up with the AI hype so I don't know what options exist out there beyond ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini right now.
    • kristiandupont 8mo ago
      I have been positively surprised with Mistral which I have been trying out.
  • heavyset_go 8mo ago
    Anthropic donated $20 million to Public First Action[1], a PAC that promotes Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and her sponsored Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)[2], a bill that will force everyone to scan their faces and IDs to use the internet under the guise of saving the children. The legislative angle taken by companies like Anthropic is that they will provide the censorship gatekeeping infrastructure to scan all user-generated content that gets posted online for "appropriateness", guaranteeing AI providers a constant firehose of novel content they can train on and get paid for the free training. AI companies will also get paid to train on videos of everyone's faces and IDs. As for why Blackburn supports KOSA[3]: > Asked what conservatives’ top priorities should be right now, Senator Blackburn answered, “protecting minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence.” She then talked about how KOSA could address this problem, and named social media platforms as places “where children are being indoctrinated.” If Anthropic, the PACs it supports and Blackburn get their way with KOSA, the end result will be that anything posted on the internet will be able to be traced back to you. Web platforms will finally be able to sell their userbases as identifiable and monetizable humans to their partners/advertisers/governments/facial recognition systems/etc. AI companies will legally enshrine themselves as the official gatekeepers and censors of the internet, and they will be paid to train on the totality of novel human creativity in real-time. That will be their moat. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-to-group-pushing-for-ai-regulations-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-t... [2] https://publicfirstaction.us/news/public-first-action-and-defending-our-values-pac-launch-first-ads-supporting-responsible-ai-regulation https://publicfirstaction.us/news/public-first-action-and-de... [3] https://www.them.us/story/kosa-senator-blackburn-censor-trans-content https://www.them.us/story/kosa-senator-blackburn-censor-tran...
• paxys 8mo ago
  Yup this is just another case of the HN bubble. I polled a bunch of non technical friends recently who I know use AI on a daily basis. Out of 10+ maybe 2 had ever heard of Claude, and no one had any interest in trying it. ChapGPT has become the AI verb, and in the consumer space it is not getting dethroned.
  • gbalduzzi 8mo ago
    Claude is definitely tech only. Gemini is the only real competitor to OpenAI in the consumer space: they already have the consumer eyes on their products and they have the financials to operate at a loss for years. They are well positioned to fight for the market
• randerson 8mo ago
  In theory you can export your data from ChatGPT under Settings > Data Controls. In practice, I tried this recently and the download link was broken. Convenient bug I must say.
  • akhilchaturvedi 8mo ago
    Make sure you're logged in to chatgpt.com in the same browser you're using to access that link.
    • svnt 8mo ago
      How would you navigate to it if you were not?
• daxfohl 8mo ago
  Yahoo, altavista, askjeeves, Google Friendster, MySpace, Facebook Netscape, ie, chrome Icq, aim, MSN messenger, a million other chat apps First mover advantage doesn't last long Very high chance that the winner in five years is a company that does not yet exist
• protocolture 8mo ago
  > The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. People used to suggest this about MySpace.
  • kristianc 8mo ago
    MySpace never had close to a billion users.
    • carlmr 8mo ago
      But everyone had at least one friend, Tom.
    • piva00 8mo ago
      300 million users in 2007 is mighty impressive, the internet was not absolutely ubiquitous like now, mobile access to it was in its infancy. Relatively speaking it is as impressive as 1 billion users in 2026.
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
• lelanthran 8mo ago
  > The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. > My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. Is she paying for it? Because as we have seen repeatedly in the past, paid products whither and die when Microsoft bundles a default replacement. You need to provide a really good reason why this time its different.
  • junipertea 8mo ago
    I believe specifically for Microsoft, they did bundle a default replacement for chatGPT in a lot of different places (Bing chat, Copilot) which use OpenAI models! But the end product is notably worse than native interface. There is a bare-minimum-level of usability required. For chat apps, good enough is good enough. For something as universally useful and easy to use as ChatGPT, the bar is higher. I don't want to comment on the financial feasibility, but whatever Microsoft put out has been a complete flop even when free, making ChatGPT $8 subscription seem worth it in comparison
    • lelanthran 8mo ago
      > But the end product is notably worse than native interface. That was my point - a lot of superior products were eaten by poor bundled replacements. Last I checked, copilot has more users than ChatGPT simply because users are using it from within Excel, Word, Outlook and Teams, without even knowing that they are using copilot. It's bundled into Windows. Right now, copilot is more useful to users than ChatGPT because it is embedded into their workflows.
      • 3836293648 8mo ago
        Copilot doesn't have users. They're rebranding their non-llm offerings as copilot to make it not look like a failure
    • akie 8mo ago
      ChatGPT and all the competitors have the exact same UI and UX.
• HlessClaudesman 8mo ago
  I think you're right about stickyness up to a point. Cultural defaults seem unchangeable but then suddenly everyone knows, that's everyone knows, that OpenAI is passé. OpenAI has a real chance to blow their lead, ending up in a hellish no-man's land by trying to please everyone: Not cool enough for normies, not safe enough for business, not radical enough for techies. Pick a lane or perish. Not owning their own infrastructure, and being propped up by financial / valuation tricks are more red flags. Being a first mover doesn't guarantee getting to the golden goose, remember MySpace.
  • oblio 8mo ago
    > Being a first mover doesn't guarantee getting to the golden goose, remember MySpace. MySpace, ICQ, Altavista, Dropbox, Yahoo, BlackBerry, Xerox Alto, Altair 8800, CP/M, WordStar, VisiCalc, the list is very long.
    • shakow 8mo ago
      VisiCalc, CP/M, BlackBerry and Yahoo definitely got a golden goose; it's long after establishing their dominance that they failed at maintaining it.
      • stingraycharles 8mo ago
        Isn’t that exactly what’s being discussed re: OpenAI? They seemed unstoppable a few years ago, but have lost quite a bit of reputation and their position of technical lead.
        • shakow 8mo ago
          What I mean is that the one I cited were first movers that actually found a golden goose, then got ousted years/decades later for various reasons. For now at least, OpenAI has not found a golden goose (i.e. made a lot of money) yet.
        • wickedsight 8mo ago
• brookst 8mo ago
  I really like your analysis and agree up to a point. The problem with a moat in the consumer space is it depends on brand and marketing. OpenAI came into this world as a tech novelty, then an amazing tech tool, then a household name. But… can they compete with massive consumer companies like Apple, Google, etc? In the long run? There’s no technical reason they can’t. The question is whether they have consumer marketing in their blood. The space doesn’t have a lot of network effects, so it’s not like early Facebook where you had to be on it because everyone was. Not saying they’ll fail, just saying it would be a significant challenge to be a hybrid frontier model / consumer product company.
• notepad0x90 8mo ago
  Microsoft is surviving precisely because of stickiness as you put it. But their users have to use them, and have to pay for it. There are very few people that use openai today that have to pay for it, those forced to use it are typically doing so via free avenues like windows copilot. OpenAI has the stickiness of MSN news or MS Teams. Your wife uses chatgpt on a daily basis but is she paying for it? If they charge her $0.99/mo will she not look at alternatives? If she gets two or three bad responses from chatgpt in a row, will she not explore alternatives to see if there is something better? Does she not use google? If she does, she is already interacting with gemini everyday via their AI overview. OpenAI has a first-to-market advantage, not a moat as you think. they can absolutley dominate the market, if they stay on top of their game. Ebay was the main online shopping network, they had that advantage, they were even the ones that made Paypal a thing! But they're relatively little used now, better alternatives crushed them. Amazon was the first-to-market with cloud services, they didn't get worse in any significant way, but their market share is not as great as it used to be, Azure has gained decent ground on them. 10 years ago the market share break down was 31/7/4, now it is 28/21/14 for AWS/Azure/GCP respectively. For OpenAI to survive it needs most of the market share, if it gets only a 3rd for example, the AI industry on its own needs to be a $1T+ industry. Over the past 10 years revenue alone (not profit) for AWS has been $620B total and just made $128B in revenue (highest) last year. OpenAI needs to make in profits (not revenue) what AWS made last year in revenue by 2029 just to break even. If it manages to just break even by then, it needs to have more profits than the revenue AWS managed to attain after its entire lifetime until now. It's far easier to switch LLM models than cloud providers too! Their only remote way of survival, I hate to say it, is by going the way of palantir and doing dirty things for governments and militaries. they need a cash-cow client that can't get anyone else like that. And even then, being US-based, I don't think outside the US any military is insane enough to use OpenAI at all due to geopolitics. Even in sectors like education, Google (via chromebooks) is more likely to form dependence than Microsoft via OpenAI since somehow they're more open to arbitrary apps due to historical anti-trust suits. I can see a somewhat far-fetched argument being made for their survival, but only on thin-threads and excellent execution. But I can't see how they can actually survive competition. They're using the Azure strategy for market share, they're banking on AI being so ubiquitous that existing vendor-lock-in mindset will serve as a moat. They'll need to be much more profitable than AWS in like 1/5th of the time. Their product is comparable to (and literally is in Azure) one of many cloud service offerings, as oppose to an entire cloud provider, and their costs are huge similar to cloud providers like needing their own data-centers level huge, they need to overcome those costs, and on top of that have $125B> revenue in like 2 years!!
• Mashimo 8mo ago
  > but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. But why would you want to? You can just leave them there at slowly start new conversation on another platform.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• renegat0x0 8mo ago
  Google has bigger network effect. It can stomp OpenAI
• pllbnk 8mo ago
  ChatGPT has a good name. It's weird and awkward but it still rolls off the tongue. And I am saying that as a non native English speaker because the name has been migrated to other languages with the English pronunciation. In comparison, Claude's name is very bad, it just doesn't sound right and people might mishear me when I say it. I never say "Claude" when talking to other, especially non-technical people, and instead say "ChatGPT" even though I am using Claude exclusively. Google has another problem - they advertise their models as separate products. There is Gemini and there is Nano Banana, also Nano Banana Pro. But they are all somehow under the same product which is still called Gemini. I understand the distinction but I am sure many non-technical people find it confusing.
  • UltraSane 8mo ago
    Claude is a terrible name but Gemini is pretty good.
    • kbelder 8mo ago
      Names-wise, I think 'Grok' is pretty good, there's just lots of other baggage that comes along with it. I still hate how Microsoft ruined the value in the name 'Cortana'. If they had a modern LLM named Cortana with the right voice, I'd be very tempted to use it just because. What other LLM has a face associated with it?
      • UltraSane 8mo ago
        Grok is way too nerdy and obscure.
  • bonoboTP 8mo ago
    They initially wanted to call it just "Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (preview)" but the Internet stuck with the anonymous codename Nano-banana from LMArena because it's interesting and quirky. Google didn't officially adopt it until several days after the public release, exactly because of what you say. Eventually, not using it in their comms got more confusing because regular people were asking how they can find this Nano banana thing everyone is hyped about.
• tikotus 8mo ago
  I hear the claim that people already have their conversation on ChatGPT and can't move them. I'm curious, what are these discussions like? I've never continued an old discussion, I just start a new one every time I have a question. If the discussion is long, I often start a new chat to get a blank slate. My experience is that the chat history just causes confusion. So I'm curious to understand: What are the discussions like that people go back to and would lose if they moved to another platform?
  • fhd2 8mo ago
    In my experience non-technical folks quite dig the memory feature. For me that's kinda context poisoning as a service, but I know people that get value out of it (or at least strongly feel they do). Not sure how one would migrate that.
    • otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
      > Not sure how one would migrate that. Ctrl-C Ctrl-V?
    • operatingthetan 8mo ago
      OpenAI will send you a download link of all your data in a zip file. You can feed it to Gemini or Claude or whatever.
      • jcfrei 8mo ago
        It's one of those super easy things that 90% of the users just never do - like changing their default search engine, export their social graph, install ad blockers, etc.
  • hereonout2 8mo ago
    I'm curious from the other direction, what are the conversations like if you feel they are easy to move? Do you have the memory feature disabled? I have the feeling this in particular is doing absolutely loads behind the scene, e.g summarising all conversations and adding additional hidden context to every request. I can start a new chat in the UI right now, ask it what my job is, what my current project is, how many kids I have, what car I drive etc. It'll know the answer already. I think it's this conversation history - or maybe better yet if we think of it as this "relationship" - that people are saying is going to make it hard to move.
• leptons 8mo ago
  All of ChatGPT's users could be gone in a month if something better comes along. And plenty of other options are coming along.
• computerex 8mo ago
  OpenAI got me to cancel my anthropic sub for Codex. Anthropic weekly limits on Pro are atrocious. You listening anthropic?
• tossandthrow 8mo ago
  Conversations are not really a valuable service for these companies. The token usage is miniscule. Agentic development and claw style personal assistants are where the dough is at.
• shinycode 8mo ago
  I don’t know how much of an anecdote it is, but all the non-tech people with whom I talk about IA only know chatGPT. Competition is either non existent or the same thing. Among those, no one wants to pay the service, they just stop using it when limits are reached. I can’t say which users can turn the market around but chatGPT is indeed burned in the mind of many and because they don’t care about tech and are not interested in tech they won’t search for any other service it seems. Even after many discussions they don’t remember the names of other IA I told them
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • foo42 8mo ago
    The only two models I ever hear non technical people mention are ChatGPT and occasionally Gemini
  • rwyinuse 8mo ago
    I would bet 100% of those people have either Apple or Android phone in their pocket. Android users already have easy access to Gemini, and Apple's Siri is going LLM soon enough as well. Google and Apple just need to push their AI assistants hard enough, and most of the moat OpenAI has will be gone.
    • chasd00 8mo ago
      Apple licensed Gemini so both Android and IPhone will point to google's AI. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-05/apple-plans-to-use-1-2-trillion-parameter-google-gemini-model-to-power-new-siri https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-05/apple-pla...
• deanc 8mo ago
  Exactly. ChatGPT is ubiquitous for the new generation of AI (LLMs) for everyone outside our of bubble. I've spoken to dozens of friends and non-techncial folks about this topic over the last year and not a single one has ever said they use Gemini, Grok or Claude. OpenAI has by far the strongest brand and user base. It's not even close. And, when it comes to the product they've been locked in the last few months it seems. The coding models are no longer behind Anthropic's and their general-use chat offering has always been up there at the top.
• gonzo41 8mo ago
  nah, open ai doesn't have a moat it has a brief window to get a lot cheaper to run or it's going to go pop when someone figure out how to do inference a lot cheaper.
• candu 8mo ago
  > but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Except these aren't conversations in the traditional sense. Yes, there's the history of prompts and responses exchanged. But the threads don't build on each other - there's no cross-conversational memory, such as you'd have in a human relationship. Even within a conversation it's mostly stateless, sending the full context history each time as input. So there's no real data or network effect moat - the moat is all in model quality (which is an extremely competitive race) and harness quality (same). I just don't think there's any real switching cost here.
  • basch 8mo ago
    ChatGPT and Gemini has cross conversation personalization. I believe the former is off by default and the latter is on.
    • strangegecko 8mo ago
      Is there more detailed information how this works? I used to assume that it can be beneficial to switch to a new chat to avoid having took much irrelevant context in the interaction. How does this personalization happen, how does it decide which parts are relevant from one conversation to another? It doesn't seem like there's a way to inspect or alter what kind of information Gemini had saved as "important information" about me (apart from deleting chats entirely, apparently).
      • basch 8mo ago
        There’s a toggle in every new Gemini chat to turn off personalization for that chat. I assume you need to make sure it’s mom globally first?
        • strangegecko 8mo ago
          On the web app, I see the "temporary chat" option but no toggle. It tells me temporary chats aren't used for model training. I thought I remembered that chats of Pro customers aren't used for that in any case. Hard to keep track of all this stuff. Ultimately, I think the crossover memory is useful, but I'd really like to know exactly what's in there and an ability to validate/adjust, not just on/off.
• jpalomaki 8mo ago
  A good solution for memory would help with stickiness. But it's a hard thing to crack.
• nextlevelwizard 8mo ago
  Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end. For myself, I use LLMs daily and I would even say a lot on some days and I _did_ pay the 20€/mo subscription for ChatGPT, but with the latest model I cannot justify that anymore. 4o was amazingly good even if it had some parasocial issues with some people, it actually did what I expect an LLM to do. Now the quality of the 5.whatever has gone drastically down. It no longer searches web for things it doesn't know, but instead guesses. Even worse is the tone it uses; "Let's look at this calmly" and other repeated sentences are just off putting and make the conversation feel like the LLM thinks I am about to kill myself constantly and that is not what I want from my LLM.
  • sigmoid10 8mo ago
    >Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end. Don't underestimate advertising. Noone pays for Facebook or Google search. Yet the ad business with a couple billion users seems profitable enough to fund frontier LLM research and inference infrastructure as a side-gig in these companies. Google only rushed out AI overview because they saw ChatGPT eating their market share in information retrieval and Zuck is literally panicking about the fact that users share more personal details with OpenAI than on his doomscrolling attention sinks.
    • nextlevelwizard 8mo ago
      Maybe I am underestimating how suggestible average people are as someone who has never in their lives clicked on an ad I just can't see ads being anything but a deterrent for using the service
      • minraws 8mo ago
        Ads aren't just for click through, they are for suggestions, and mind share as well. You can't click on the budweiser logo when watching super bowl ad. But if you sit in your chatgpt window all day then it's probably worth it for advertisers to expect to build familiarity with brands they advertise.
• gloryjulio 8mo ago
  Not sure how that works when there are fierce competitions, and openai's product is not substantially better than the rest. There are US competitors, then China. Take ozempic as an example. The word is already part of the culture, but the company is losing badly to lly. Novo nordisk is projecting revenue DECLINE while eli lilly is still growing massively. I am not even sure people know other glp1 drugs other than ozempic. I don't even remember lilly drugs name. I think people should not underestimate the market. It's a dynamic game where engineering intuition might not be enough
• enos_feedler 8mo ago
  Completely disagree with this take. I was an early free OpenAI user and switched to Gemini once it got good enough and bundled a bunch of services together to make the paid product free. OpenAI will need distribution to maintain any kind of durable market share. They need to become a bundler of other subs, or else they will just be the next Disney+ or Spotify that needs telecoms (Hah!) to push their paid product onto user's phone bills.
• medi8r 8mo ago
  We are in the Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos etc. stage. Plenty of room for a Google still.
• CamelCaseCondo 8mo ago
  and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. This obstacle looks familiar.
• KeplerBoy 8mo ago
  Do people care about their old LLM sessions? I might have sessions I revisit over a few weeks, but nothing longer than that. The conversations feel as ephemeral as the code produced. Some tiny fractions of it might persist long term, but most of it is already forgotten and replaced by lunch time.
  • scandox 8mo ago
    My barber does. It's his therapist and the fact that it knows all about his life is very important to him.
    • u8080 8mo ago
      >revealing all psychological exploits you have to 3rd party corporation Scary shit
• wouldbecouldbe 8mo ago
  Switching llms is like switching a car. Its a bit annoying in the beginning, it responds slightly different and you need to change you subconscious habits before it feels comfortable. Why everyone always complains about new models. So unless there is a very obvious improvement; most users will prefer to stick to their current llm
  • checker659 8mo ago
    That has not been my experience at all. My mom and dad were able to switch from ChatGPT to Gemini without any friction whatsoever. I myself round robin between Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT all the time.
• mvdtnz 8mo ago
  I think you're overestimating stickiness. People spoke endlessly about stickiness of Google for years and years and it took what 18 months for Google search to become virtually irrelevant after LLMs came along?
• testdelacc1 8mo ago
  The difficulty is that “winning” in this case is setting up a monopoly or duopoly and slowly increasing prices. It’s not clear if OpenAI can get so far ahead of the competition that it becomes a two or one horse race. Right now Anthropic and Google are at least as good. And the open source models keep them all honest pricing wise. OpenAI will likely keep their billion users, and likely monetise them fairly effectively with ads. Their revenue will be considerable. It’s less clear that OpenAI will “win” and their competitors won’t.
• raincole 8mo ago
  I disagree. So far I've seen people use "Photoshop" and "Google" as verbs. No one uses "ChatGPT" as a verb. People do use ChatGPT but the brand recognition isn't that strong. My anecdotes are that Google is winning even on consumer side.
  • robotpepi 8mo ago
    > No one uses "ChatGPT" as a verb. In my experience, they do, a lot. "I asked ChatGPT" is something I hear a lot. And yes, this example is not using ChatGPT as a verb, but the idea of brand recognition is there; it's just a grammar thing.
    • raincole 8mo ago
      > I asked ChatGPT > use ChatGPT as a verb Pick one. And yes I think they are worlds apart.
    • widenrun 8mo ago
      Today I heard at least 5 times something along the lines "I got this from ChatGPT", "I asked ChatGPT"...
  • ben_w 8mo ago
    As a verb, no, but the product name somehow feels the wrong shape to verb it. I'd say the voice assistants have Google at a disadvantage for similar reasons: "OK Google" is clunky, whereas "Hey Siri," and "Alexa," are not. But to ChatGPT: when I wander around Berlin, I do overhear people talking about ChatGPT by name. For all the typical integrated LLM-based "assistants" in other products, I mainly hear people saying things like "I hate it" and "how do I turn this off" and so on, including the one Google has on its search results. The other pure-play chat-bots that have enough mind-share to even be in the news are Grok (where twitter users seem to like it a lot, even though everyone else up to and including non-US world governments hate it to the point of wanting it banned), Claude (but even then only because of Claude Code), and DeepSeek (because it shows China has no difficulty keeping up with the US). I heard about Mistrial when it was new, but even with the app on my phone I didn't think about it again until about a month ago. Ask a normal person about Gemini, I'd expect them to think you were talking astrology, not AI.
• piokoch 8mo ago
  The problem is that, at least for now, it is dead easy to switch to something else. No need to convert anything, reconfigure anything, it is not like changing gmail to something else or dropping Word for LibreOffice. Chat window is a chat window. I can imagine that sooner or later things like OpenClaw (or its alikes) will become more popular and that could be something that will catch users.
• ulfw 8mo ago
  Having a known brand is not a moat mate. Sorry. myspace used to be a well known brand. I've worked there.
• seydor 8mo ago
  Google is sticky too, and has a huge moat around that access (android, browsers). Google hasn't yet pushed hard into dominating the chatGPT use case, but they could EASILY push out chatGPT if they tried. For example, if they instantly turned their search page to the gemini chat, they would instantly have dominated openAI use cases. I'm not saying they would do that, they will probably go for the 'everything app' approach slowly I think the use cases of chatGPT and google are not differentiated enough to justify 2 winners
• petesergeant 8mo ago
  The problem with the stickiness is that they will eventually need to start charging, and that friction point will immediately make them come undone. Let’s says they charge $1.99 a month, and Anthropic then step in with a six month free offer, and suddenly everyone has two apps on their phone they’re comfortable with, and it’s a price war over very lightly differentiated products
• raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  And? The tech landscape is littered with companies they had users who couldn’t monetize through ads. Beside the costs of serving request via LLMs is orders of magnitude greater than a search result. On top of that, OpenAI is a sharecropper on other companies’ server, they depend on another company’s search engine and unlike Google, they are dependent on Nvidia. Don’t forget that most browsing is done on the web and Google is the default search engine on almost every phone sold outside of China.
• mi_lk 8mo ago
  by this argument Google will win though. Identical interface with similar quality answers
  • sauercrowd 8mo ago
    I wish it would be, but it's not. Gemini feels more sluggish, it's relatively overloaded with animations compared to chatgpt. Like most Google products.
    • hparadiz 8mo ago
      I've been testing Gemini as I code on Claude 4.6 and the answers aren't great for coding. ChatGPT has been better. But it did a good job with some personal IRA/401k planning. It feels like it's only a few months behind though.
    • wolvesechoes 8mo ago
      > Like most Google products. And yet Google has search monopoly, is part of mobile duopoly, has almost monopoly on e-mail and data storage, is strong player in office solutions, and owns the biggest entertainment platform in form of YT. Seems like sluggishness and animations don't mean as much to normal people.
• s08148692 8mo ago
  As a counter anecdote, my wife stopped using it because it is quite terrible when you ask it about current events. She almost exclusively uses the Grok app now because it has the "best" internet search and current events results
  • Barbing 8mo ago
    >the Grok app now because it has the "best" internet search Why is this? Thanks to Twitter? More aggressive proxy use? Tuned to deliver to stay competitive? … Was under the impression they didn’t have much in the way of secret sauce.
• hwers 8mo ago
  I definitely think they’ve nailed the personality better than others too. Gemini and grok are always paragraphs and paragraphs of text to sift through for something that with openai is usually digested to much less
• MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
  Does she pay for it. No? Then she’s causing them a loss
• Gigachad 8mo ago
  At the conversation backlogs worth anything? To me they seem as valuable as Google search history. After maybe 3 days they are worthless.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Leynos 8mo ago
    People get attached to month long conversations, strangely. Sometimes even refusing to use the fork feature. And the memories are also something that adds to this greatly.
    • Gigachad 8mo ago
      I guess if you treat it like a virtual boyfriend. Personally I found the memories to be an anti feature. I start chats to get a clean slate and test new ideas without previous ones polluting the chat.
• beAbU 8mo ago
  The moment openai starts charging for their service properly, people will start shopping around. See power users such as devs with coding assistants that have model selection dropdowns allowing you to switch on a whim. There is zero loyalty or stickiness in the paying user crowd.
  • aaronrobinson 8mo ago
    Or using ads
    • beAbU 8mo ago
      Ads are a little more insidious, and normies aren't nearly as allergic to them as they should be. But whether openAI can achieve their revenue targets by ads alone is a different question.
  • bob1029 8mo ago
    I am starting to believe that OAI might actually succeed at getting per token inference cost to where it needs to be. Or that it's already there in principle. Wafer scale compute is a very big deal. Most of HN is probably still unaware that you can get tokens out of one of these devices right now via public API offerings.
• epolanski 8mo ago
  I don't really see that stickiness to be honest. Most people I know with android phones, myself included, just use Gemini which is bundled with the OS and has a dedicated button, has excellent data and integration with maps and such. When it comes to enterprise, non IT companies (banking, insurance, etc) in Europe seem to be defaulting to Google's offerings, Gemini and NotebookLM in particular.
• y42 8mo ago
  Why would you want to move conversations with you? I use multiple different models, I don't care about the history. My "brain" in terms of projects, is local on my computer. I have a simple set of system rules that I need to copy. I am not everyone, I understand that. What I try to say: don't overestimate the lock in effect of AI. I doubt there is one.
  • benhurmarcel 8mo ago
    > I don't care about the history. I've actually been using the Gemini app more because it auto-deletes old history. I like using LLMs without thinking this is going to stick around forever. Models are relatively interchangeable for day-to-day use anyway.
• jmyeet 8mo ago
  I think that's false. The cost of switching is so low that the best product will win and there's no moat. I honestly can't see how OpenAI can possibly recoup the hundreds of billions poured into it at this point. I'd say AI assistants are no more sticky than browsers or search engines. You might be tempted to say that Chrome or Google are sticky. But they're really not. A lot of people aren't old enough to remember the 90s when we had multiple search engines and people did switch. I know this goes against prevailing HN dogma but I'm sorry: Google is simply the best search engine. It doesn't have a magical hold on people. People aren't fooling themselves. And Chrome? Before smartphones it was simply the better browser. Firefox used to have a much larger market share and Chrome ate their lunch. By being a better browser. Chrome was I think the first browser, or at least the first major browser, to do one process per tab. I still remember Firefox hanging my entire browser when something went wrong. I switched to Chrome in version 2 for that reason. And now browsers are more sticky because of Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS. Safari really needs to be cross-platform, like seriously so. I know they briefly tried on Windows but they didn't really mean it. Anyway, back to the point. I believe there's a certain amount of brand inertia but that's it. If Gemini dominates ChatGPT performance and UI/UX, people will switch so fast. Google, Microsoft and Meta can survive the AI collapse. Apple is irrelevant (at least for now). OpenAI? Doomed IMHO.
• jdjdkkfjrjr 8mo ago
  That being said: I used MySpace daily too... Until I didn't.
• StevenNunez 8mo ago
  It's way too easy to export your context for this to be real. I moved away from ChatGPT from Gemini months ago and haven't thought of it. Paid.
• puppymaster 8mo ago
  several of my friends named their chatgpt 'Amanda' or 'George' because they talked about real mental issues with it. I don't see them moving to another platform because that's essentially asking them to leave their 'best friend/therapist'.
  • estearum 8mo ago
    ... your friends should probably see a human therapist before going much further... I don't mean this in a flippant or insulting way.
• HarHarVeryFunny 8mo ago
  I think that kind of inertia mostly lasts as long as there is no financial incentive to move. A ChatGPT user who is not paying anything to OpenAI is of little benefit to them, and has little incentive to switch. However if OpenAI start trying to make money off those users by adding advertising, or removing the free tier, then things may change. Google can afford to subsidize chat from their other revenue streams, but OpenAI can't.
  • famouswaffles 8mo ago
    >However if OpenAI start trying to make money off those users by adding advertising, or removing the free tier, then things may change. Tech forums tend to be in a bit of a bubble. People said the same thing about Netflix and it just quickly became their most popular sub. People don't care about advertising unless it's really obnoxious. The idea that people will unsub en masse once Open AI starts rolling ads is a pipe dream. And the kind of user that won't pay and won't suffer some ads is the kind of user nobody wants.
    • swexbe 8mo ago
      Customers come back to Netflix since they have the best content out of all the streaming providers. This is their moat. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is literally exactly identical to their competitors for the most common use cases.
      • famouswaffles 8mo ago
        Customers stay at Netflix because it's cheap, what they're used to, and it has enough on the catalogue to keep people satisfied most of the time. They're not constantly evaluating who has the better catalogue. And most of that catalogue is content they have no real ownership of anyway, at least, until the WB buyout is finalized. And Netflix is hardly the only example. Like clockwork, people here say the same thing about anyone including ads, to the same result - No-one cares. This is just one of those things that is popular to say in these kinds of forums but has no bearing in real life. Most people are sticky with products they're satisfied with. They don't switch unless a competitor is: - much cheaper - much better Neither of these is the case in the LLM consumer space. Nobody cares or notices that gemini topped the benchmarks for a couple months before being dethroned, and as far as new features and improvements is concerned, Open AI is the clear leader. All everyone did and still does is follow their lead, even down to the pricing model. Basically every single feature/model improvement you can think of in the LLM consumer space is something Open AI brought first and they get almost all the buzz from it.
• torginus 8mo ago
  I think defaultism plays a huge role. If your wife's next smartphone or TV or whatever comes with AI made by a different company, I think she won't really care and use that if it's good. By the way this is a perfectly rational stance. If the supermarket next to me stopped stocking Coca Cola, I would just by Pepsi.
• LightBug1 8mo ago
  I disagree (imo). It would take me minutes to copy across a histories of projects and continue relatively unscathed by the experience. I use chatGPT and currently relatively like it. But there is no moat beyond that. Not like, for example, whatssap where it's almost impossible to detach from it due to the network ... (I've really tried with about a 10% success rate)
• kashyapc 8mo ago
  > Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. Maybe you're overestimating their "moat" and stickiness. The dust is still settling on this madness and "OpenAI"[1] creates a lot of noise in the market. These LLMs are being rapidly commoditized, very soon they will become as "boring" as virtual machines or containers. Altman has the exceptional skill to dupe people into giving their money to him. The "infinite money glitch" that he has been exploiting isn't really infinite. I just hope there'll be a breakthrough with truly transparent LLMs that will stabilize this madness. As I've griped[2] two years ago, I find OpenAI too scummy, and it is unlikely that they will "win" with their sleazy ways. [1] Air quotes because of their persistent abuse of the word "open" [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425735
• AdamN 8mo ago
  I don't think they have a billion active users who opted-in. Google/Apple/Microsoft are the gatekeepers (for the most part) for retail users and they decide who is on by default. The USG isn't going to step-in and the EU won't step in either. So I suspect that Google will lean into Gemini, Microsoft will lean into OpenAI, and Apple ... it's a tough question what they do in the longer term. For business users it's a different story and I see room for Anthropic to shine. And then there are the specialty AI services but those are all different markets from the general purpose AI.
  • steveBK123 8mo ago
    I think Google may just end up winning on the good enough / cheap enough dimensions as things get more commoditized in LLM world.. in that they can be the lower cost provider given how vertically integrated they would be compared to OpenAI relying on hyperscalers.
    • AdamN 8mo ago
      I'm aligned there. I think it will be Google/Gemini gets 50% of the generic market and then OpenAI gets 30% (via Microsoft) and then a long tail. The rest of the vendors will be awesome at their markets (Claude Code for coders) and can handle generic stuff too. Apple will do whatever they do but it will solely drive users in the Apple ecosystem and they will likely just use one of the other vendors - I'm guessing Google longterm since they speak the same language. There's no point in empowering Anthropic/OpenAI to sit at the top of the pyramid although oddly Apple and OpenAI did that partnership but I feel like that was Apple not thinking ahead.
  • chasd00 8mo ago
    > Apple ... it's a tough question what they do in the longer term. my guess is the just keep licensing gemini and move on with making more money instead of selling 100 year bonds to raise debt.
• PaywallBuster 8mo ago
  i've been using chat gpt for 'chatting/questions' kind of things + snippets of code it's plenty good on free tier as soon as they start adding restrictions / raising prices / etc won't take long to look for alternatives
• DrScientist 8mo ago
  So in summary OpenAI are basing their valuation of 285 billion on the moat of 'users won't be arsed to download a different app'??? Seems optimistic when there is very little intrinsic stickness due to learning the UI or network effects. Perhaps a little bit chat history - but not 285 billions worth. Also completely ignoring the fact that most devices things will start to come with the same features directly built into the device/app - and the largest market will be as a commodity backend api that the eventually users won't know or care if it's a google or openai model. As I see it, they need to be doing stuff nobody else can ( in either price or performance ), otherwise it's hard to justify the valuation.
  • graemep 8mo ago
    It have worked for Google for years, and that was without even the barrier of download in app, just going to a different URL.
    • kergonath 8mo ago
      Google was clearly superior fo a long time. They got close to 90% before enshitification started in earnest. We are not at that stage yet with AI chatbots. Also, Google benefited from being the default on mainstream OSes. When people have to download an application, getting one or the other does not take more effort. Yes, OpenAI being tightly integrated within Windows, Android, and iOS would be a moat. That’s not the case and it is unlikely to happen. Google will go with their own and Apple won’t put itself in a situation where they are reliant on a single company, they got burned enough times.
      • DrScientist 8mo ago
        Exactly - it was better for a long time. Also which search engine was the default was a massive factor - that's why Google paid for that. If Google hadn't controlled Chrome, and or paid for defaults - they could have pretty much lost all their traffic overnight - ( if they weren't better ).
      • cowhax 8mo ago
• lm28469 8mo ago
  > The near billion users OpenAI has They're losing market share and the growth of active user plateaued. They captured all the normies who learned about llms on TV but these people will never spend a cent as you said. They're not even on the top 10 most used llms on openrouter anymore: https://openrouter.ai/rankings https://openrouter.ai/rankings At the current pace anthropic will make more money than openai soon: https://epochai.substack.com/p/anthropic-could-surpass-openai-in https://epochai.substack.com/p/anthropic-could-surpass-opena... https://menlovc.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2-llm_api_market_share-073025-scaled.webp https://menlovc.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2-llm_api_mar...
  • ianm218 8mo ago
    I’m not rooting for open AI but OpenRouter is a very self selecting group. Most API users of Anthropocic or OpenAi would just go through the normal API
  • ern 8mo ago
    I'm surprised how many of my technical team use free ChatGPT in their personal lives. The rest have Claude subscriptions. I'm the only one with ChatGPT and Claude subs and I'll be switching from Claude Pro to Ckaude Max and cancelling ChatGPT, since I only use it when I hit my Claude quota.
• kergonath 8mo ago
  > Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. I’ve got a small-ish sample of friends who are regular people and use various AI chatbots because mobile phone providers now commonly bundle an AI subscription with their services. People seem to switch between Perplexity, Claude, and ChatGPT without any trouble. It does not look sticky at all to me and the half-a-percent difference in benchmarks we love to obsess about does not translate at all in increased user satisfaction.
• andrewmutz 8mo ago
  Netscape had a 90% market share in 1995. If OpenAI is metaphorically netscape, what prevents its competitors from prying away customers every day? What prevents google/facebook/microsoft from using their position to bundle chat experiences? Especially if the tech is a commodity and OpenAI's models are about as good as everyone elses?
  • kenjackson 8mo ago
    In 1995 no one used the web still. Sure, we all did, but it was pretty niche. I think you could argue that chatbots are niche as well, but the user base of OpenAI is way larger now than Netscape in 1995. Netscape had probably 25 million users at the end of 1995. ChatGPT has about 800 million.
• re-thc 8mo ago
  > I think OpenAI has better chance to winning on the consumer side than everyone else. Which doesn't make money. > Of course, would that much up against hundreds of billions of dollars in capex remains to be seen. Most of that is a bet against enterprise adoption. Automation of customer service, sales, marketing, warehouses, medical discoveries, etc...
• iamleppert 8mo ago
  It's really easy to overcome that -- just sponsor some IndieDevs to flood the internet with scripts and tools to migrate all your conversations from OpenAI. Make it easy for people to switch using a simple process, make sure it's well distributed, and BOOM! Watch their user count drop like a rock. People act like just because a service has a lot of users it can't be destroyed. Anyone who has ever worked at a large web company can tell you otherwise. These things can be destroyed in a just a few days if they are targeted. They look like fortresses from the outside, but they are all incredibly vulnerable. That's the truth they don't want people to know or realize just how vulnerable they all are.
• tantalor 8mo ago
  My wife, for example, uses [Netscape Navigator] on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. There are no network effects for sure, but people have hundreds and thousands on [bookmarks] on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. See how stupid it sounds?
  • vaylian 8mo ago
    Given how long people have stuck with Internet Explorer, I don't think this is a good example.
    • tantalor 8mo ago
      Internet Explorer doesn't exist anymore!
      • vaylian 8mo ago
        took long enough
• fullstick 8mo ago
  They are more easily moved than other data honestly. You can use chat gpt to build your own chatbot and then export all of your data from openai and load it into the new chatbot.
• overgard 8mo ago
  I imagine the stickiest customers would be large enterprises. You aren't going to get the evangelists to stick on a single model provider, so their best bet is probably employees who are going to have their choices dictated to them by whoever purchases the softare. (Especially in large enterprises where using an unapproved AI provider is likely not allowed, or the AI is imposed on the workers.) The question then is, how do you differentiate yourself in enterprise sales? As much as people seem to dislike Copilot, from a business standpoint "buy the extra microsoft thing in our current contract" or "buy the extra google thing in our current contract" could likely be a lot cheaper/less friction.
• dontwannahearit 8mo ago
  I think there are users who view "their AI" as somewhere in the venn-diagram of their relationships. And it's a spectrum, at one end you got the full-on AI psychosis and at the other "its a machine, I owe it nothing". Conversational AI is going to be sticky to the extent that you see a switch to a different provider as dropping a relationship.
• ronald_petty 8mo ago
  At this moment, I agree. Your average person (which doesn't really exist) has already been exposed and trained on ChatGPT. Arguing moving to another "chat" experience has not gone well, for example Bing, etc. Pretty sure Google had the "box" figured out first and won. I think people overthink how much effort people are willing to put into "change". There is nothing wrong with staying put if it works, after all, there is an unlimited number of other things happening in this world besides AI.
• btbuildem 8mo ago
  > people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere Neither can they be easily searched nor organized. And what prolonged AI use teaches you is: don't search for that old chat, just ask anew. That particular piece of flypaper isn't as sticky as it may seem.
• daxfohl 8mo ago
  I don't think chat history is enough for real stickiness. But the trillion dollar question is, what is? Now that I think about it, I'd bet heavily on Google. They've got your email, your photos, your location history, yada yada. Once they're able to pull all that into AI and make a reasonably cohesive product out of it, it seems like that's what people would use by default. Plus they've got a browser, search page, and phone OS that all can lead you to their AI. They could train custom LoRA layers to mimic your tone, encode special tokens that indicate your name and data and various facts about you and your contacts, to make output more accurate, consistent, and personalized. Lots of possibilities for increased stickiness. Even enterprise-wise, gemini is pretty good at coding and if your company has all its docs on Google docs, that could become a pretty seamless integration. They can even build their agents to prefer GCP, or maybe make that the free tier but have other providers support be more expensive. At some point, a reasonable business model might be "we replace your engineering team with AI plus a few Google engineers on retainer for when things get wonky," which could scale to pretty large. (Granted this sounds more like a msft power move.) They already have all the infrastructure, all they need is a reasonable competitor to github. They really screwed up losing out to msft on that one!
• matchagaucho 8mo ago
  These articles are largely based on a false equivalence of LLM=moat. That's not the case. OpenAI is advancing on many fronts; codex, vectorStore, embeddings, response API, containers, batch processing, voice-to-speech, image generation... the list goes on.
• fuzzfactor 8mo ago
  To the extent that it is a popularity contest, that's one thing. Of course the first thing people may look at is technologies going head-to-head. Another big one is user pricing, plus the underlying cost to serve users. Actually minus that cost. Biggest so far is capital. Seems to be going that way, a contest of capital could dominate like so many other things regardless of technologies. There are probably other things that companies may leverage if competition does really ramp up. It may not have to be a moat to be a defining characteristic that some prefer.
• simg 8mo ago
  >on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. they can be super easily moved. just use the existing export feature, all a competitor needs is ability to import conversations.
• parliament32 8mo ago
  "Near billion users", yet less than 5% pay them a single penny[1]. Like you said, the vast majority of these will never pay anything, but I'd argue the majority will migrate to the "next" free provider as soon as OpenAI starts inserting too many ads into the product. I watched my partner switch from OAI to DeepSeek during the last outage and she hasn't been back to OAI since. I am skeptical there is any actual stickyness when basically all of the chatbots do the same thing for the casual user. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/openais_chatgpt_popular_few_pay/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/openais_chatgpt_popul...
  • nfm 8mo ago
    Google Search has no stickiness and they managed to build a behemoth. ChatGPT is a great product, but the lack of stickiness comes into play because there are many viable alternatives. They’re all going to have to monetise the consumer segment at some stage, and I think that’s likely to be via ads on a freemium tier in most instances.
    • judahmeek 8mo ago
      Google Search was head & shoulders better than the alternatives back when Google was developing into the behemoth it is today. Google search still has a ton of stickiness for the casual user.
    • dh2022 8mo ago
      Google Search used to be awesome, heads, shoulders, belt buckle and knees above everyone else. Seriously, I still remember the moment I first used Google. I was using Altavista / OpenText and Yahoo now and then. I thought Altavista was the best and OpenText was for geeking out. Once I tried Google I never looked back for decades. Their tech was their moat.
  • Esophagus4 8mo ago
    You say 5% of users pay like it’s a shockingly bad number, but that’s almost exactly the same as YouTube’s paid subscribers (125m) vs MAUs (2.5b). Like it or not, OpenAI is building a real business. It’s obviously capital intensive, but we will see how it goes. And no, the vast majority will not migrate. Just like the vast majority didn’t migrate away from Google after they launched ads. I don’t get the HN urge to be the contrarian saying “that’ll never work.”
• outside1234 8mo ago
  I don't know. I switched to Gemini and haven't missed anything from OpenAI even for a second. I could switch back to OpenAI and not miss anything from Gemini. I don't feel the stickiness AT ALL.
• outside1234 8mo ago
  This is what Netscape thought too
• tyjen 8mo ago
  My nontechnical friends only know about ChatGPT, all other LLMs are a complete and total mystery to them outside of what is built into Google's search engine and Copilot. I imagine they represent the majority of consumers. It'd require significant marketing campaign for most of them to switch or for OpenAI to make a substantial mistake.
  • twelve40 8mo ago
    do they use facebook or instagram? meta jammed their LLM into the search box there. Do they use google at all? the AI summary produced by Gemini leads you to click on "more details" with gemini. so while this is technically true: > My nontechnical friends only know about ChatGPT they may actually use a ton of other LLMs without knowing
• greggsy 8mo ago
  I disagree. Are people really that attached to their conversations though? Anecdotally, the vast majority of my own conversations and coding interactions are transient in nature, to the point where I prefer to use the ‘temporary’ mode in whatever tool I’m using. For coding, every project needs a plan and readme to get whatever agent back up to speed with what the task is. Anyone with a paid-for GH Copilot license knows that you can just switch between whatever provider at a whim, depending on the needs of your task or financial requirements. I think people will find it easier to revert back to Siri 2.0 if that ever materialises, in which case the stickiness moat is bridged by a more familiar and widely integrated abstraction layer.
• Yizahi 8mo ago
  Just as people underestimate bundling and multiple-product companies. As soon as LLM corpos will start increasing prices to actually match expenses and recouping their immense debts customers will very quickly catch up how OAI product is x5 times more expensive than Google's and the only moat is is to open pre-installed Gemini :) . Competing in freeware products is impossible as soon as monopoly emerges. Competing in paid products is way easier, especially after free money age has ended.
• pizzly 8mo ago
  I never considered that. When I change LLM models its usually due to two reasons. 1. the current AI model is producing answers that do not met my needs so I try multiple others at the same time and the one that produces the best answer I stick with until I have this problem again. 2. there is a new model released and advertises a new capability that I want to try out. I can imagine that for many people the answer that ChatGPT generates is adequate enough that they never need to try another model even if better answers exists from another model. For people with less complex needs this is a very real stickiness. Why make the effort to try something new if the answer is adequate. In this case, OpenAI would only f*k up if they change the pricing significantly, add intrusive ads or their answers become significantly worse.
• LZ_Khan 8mo ago
  But also a billion users is ChatGPT's biggest weakness. So many free users burning compute up. So many incentives to nerf the intelligence to affordable levels. Sounds like a nightmare.
• SergeAx 7mo ago
  There's no stickiness per se. The thing is, all modern LLMs are good enough to answer everyday questions most people ask. Moreover, I really think most people using LLMs for more specific tasks (e.g., coding) will not be able to distinguish top LLMs in a blind test.