ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand. That's worth 100x more than "product stickiness". They have 700 million weekly users and growing much faster than Google.

I think your points on Google being well positioned are apt for capitalization reasons, but only one company has consumer mindshare on "AI" and its the one with "ai" in its name.

Every one of them refers to using “ChatGPT” when talking about AI.

How likely is it to stay that way? No idea, but OpenAI has clearly captured a notable amount of mindshare in this new era.

It is the same with chatGPT.

In that case, you should try OpenAI's gpt-oss!

Both models are pretty fast for their size and I wanted to use them to summarize stories and try out translation. But it keeps checking everything against "policy" all the time! I created a jailbreak that works around this, but it still wastes a few hundred tokens talking about policy before it produces useful output.

I suspect they chose that name because of the proximity with the word "cloud".

Same here. I tried saying ‘I asked LLM’ or ‘I asked AI’ but that doesn’t sound right for me. So, in most conversations I say ‘I asked Chat GPT’ and in most of these situations, it feels like the exact provider does not matter, since essentially they are very similar in their nature.

That's a you thing.

But when I'm being more serious I'd usually just say "I asked GPT"

I have a colleague who just refers to AI as "Chat" which I think is kinda cute, but people also use the term "chat" to refer to... Like, people, or "yall". Or to their stream chat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

Huh, bubble wrap, even.

Video description, from the Velcro brand YouTube channel:

Our Velcro Brand Companies legal team decided to clear a few things up about using the VELCRO® trademark correctly – because they’re lawyers and that’s what they do. When you use “velcro” as a noun or a verb (e.g., velcro shoes), you diminish the importance of our brand and our lawyers lose their insert fastening sound. So please, do not say “velcro shoes” (or “velcro wallet” or “velcro gloves”) - we repeat “velcro” is not a noun or a verb. VELCRO® is our brand. #dontsayvelcro

But since buying a vacuum usually involves going to a store, looking at available devices, and paying for them, the value of a brand name is less significant.

Post-pandemic, at work and such, "Zoom" has become synonymous for work call. Whether it's via Slack or Google Meet, or even Zoom, we use the term Zoom.

I don't know what the market share is on Skype (Pre-pandemic) or Zoom, but these common terms appear to exist for software.

Years old company growing faster than decades old company!

2.5 billion people use Gmail. I assume people check their mail (and, more importantly, receive mail) much more often than weekly.

ChatGPT has a lot of growing to do to catch up, even if it's faster

When I ask about which toaster is best, is it going to show me ads for a motorcycle because that's what I asked about last week?

I would wager that she was part of an A/B testing group, so her instruction may not have any real effect. However, we were both appalled by that output and immediately discussed alternative AI options, should such a change become permanent.

This isn’t the rise of Google, where they have a vastly superior product and can boil us frogs by slowly serving us more and more ads. We are already boiling mad from having become hypersensitive to products wholly tainted by ads.

We ain’t gunna take it anymore.

If by "phenomenal" you mean "the premier slop and spam provider", then yes.

It just turns out that the wider public loves peddling slop. (Not so much though when on the receiving end.)

Yeah, exactly - like I said, generating slop.

(That same hypothetical mom will get annoyed when on the receiving end of a slop-generated email, though.)

I don't think majority of those 700m people use the product because of the brand. Products are a non-trivial contributor to the brand.

Also, if it were phenomenal, they wouldn't be called ClosedAI ;)

My observation is different: ChatGPT may be well-known, but does not have a really good reputation anymore (I'd claim that it is in average of equal dubious reputation as Google) in particular in consideration of

- a lot of public statements and actions of Sam Altman (in particular his involvement into Worldcoin (iris scanning) makes him untolerable for being the CEO of a company that is concerned about its reputation)

- the attempts to overthrow Sam Altman's throne

- most people know that OpenAI at least in the past collaborated a lot with Microsoft (not a company that is well-regarded). But the really bad thing is that the A"I" features that Microsoft introduced into basically every product are hated by users. Since people know that these at least originated in ChatGPT products, this stained OpenAI's reputation a lot. Lesson: choose carefully who you collaborate with.

I bet at most 10 % of people in the West can name the CEO of OpenAI.

I can assure you that in Germany (where people are very sensitive with respect to privacy topics), Sam Altman (in particular because of his involvement with Worldcoin ("iris scanning" -> surveillance)) has a very bad reputation by many people.

But does that mean that all of the people who talk about "asking ChatGPT" are actually asking ChatGPT, from OpenAI?

How many of them are actually asking Claude? Or Gemini? Or some other LLM?

That's the trouble when your brand name gets genericized.

If normal people start saying "ChatGPT" to refer to AI they win, just like how google became a verb for search.

It seems to be the case.

You can give your most active 50,000 users $160,000 each, for example.

You can run campaign ads in every billboard, radio, tv station and every facebook feed tarring and feathering ChatGPT

Hell, for only $200m you could just get the current admin to force ChatGPT to sell to Larry Ellison, and deport Sam Altman to Abu Dahbi like Nermal from Garfield.

So many options!

> OpenAI also spent US$2 billion on sales and ad

I know it seems intuitively true but was surprised to not really find evidence for it.

anyways would be nice to really see some apples-to-apples benchmarks of the TPU vs Nvidia hardware but how would that work given CUDA is not hardware agnostic?

This was true pre-ChatGPT, but Google is releasing and updating products furiously now. It's hard to think of a part of the AI space where Google does not have the leading or a very competitive offering.

But Google have other weaknesses. In the most valuable market (the USA) Google is very politically exposed. The left don't like them because they're big rich techbro capitalists, the Democrats tried to break them up. The right hate them because of their ongoing censorship, social engineering and cancellation of the right. They're rapidly running out of friends.

Just compare:

https://www.google.com/search?q=conservative+ai

https://www.bing.com/search?q=conservative+ai

The Google SERP is a trash fire, and it must be deliberate. It's almost like the search engine is broken. Not a single conservative chat bot ranks. On Bing the results are full of what the searcher is looking for. ChatGPT isn't perfect but it's a lot less biased than Google is. Its search results come from Bing which is more politically neutral. Also Altman is a fresh face who hasn't antagonized the right in the same way Google has. For ~half the population Gemini is still branded as "the bot that drew black nazis and popes", ChatGPT isn't. That's an own goal they didn't need.

My non-tech friend said she prefer ChatGPT more than Gemini, most due to its tone.

So non-tech people may not know the different in technical detail, but they sure can have bias.

I think OpenAI is pursuing a different market from Google right now. ChatGPT is a companion, Gemini is a tool. That's a totally arbitrary divide, though. Change out the system prompts and the web frontend. Ta-daa, you're in a different market segment now.

The teens, they don't know what is OpenAI, they don't know what is Gemini. They sure know what is ChatGPT.

I'm sure that far fewer people to go gemini.google.com than to chatgpt.com, but Google has LLMs seamlessly integrated in each of these products, and it's a part of people's workflows at school and at work.

For a while, I was convinced that OpenAI had won and that Google won't be able to recover, but this lack of vertical integration is becoming a liability. It's probably why OpenAI is trying to branch into weird stuff, like running a walled-garden TikTok clone.

Also keep in mind that unlike OpenAI, Google isn't under pressure to monetize AI products any time soon. They can keep subsidizing them until OpenAI runs out of other people's money. I'm not saying OpenAI has no path forward, but it's not all that clear-cut.

If any company is going to get the windfall of "AI provider by default" it is going to be Microsoft. Possibly powered by OpenAI models running on Azure.

Google could make a "better" (basically - more sublime) advertising platform but little to attract new users. Perhaps Android usage would rise - Apple _is_ behind on AI after all. On the other hand, users will either use the AI integrated into Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Teams, Edge and more, or else users' AI of choice (ChatGPT) will learn to as competently drive the Windows and Web UIs as Claude Code drives bash, giving a productive experience with your desktop (and cloud) apps.

Once you use _that_ tool, its now where you start asking questions, not google.com. I am constantly asking ChatGPT and Claude about things I might be purchasing, making comparisons, etc (amongst many other things I might possibly google). Microsoft has an existing interest in advertising, and OpenAI is currently exploring how best go about it. My bet isn't on Google right now.

Sure, if you join a bank or a government agency, or a big company that's been around for 40+ years, you're probably gonna be using Microsoft products. But the bulk of startups, schools, and small businesses use Google products nowadays.

Judging by their MX record, OpenAI is a Google shop... so is Perplexity... so is Anthropic... so is Mistral.

Idk, younger companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are using google.

Billions of people use Meta apps and products. Meta AI is all over all those apps. Why is usage minuscule compared to ChatGPT or even Gemini ? Google has billions of users, many using devices operating their own OS, in which Gemini is now the default AI assistant, so why does ChatGPT usage still dwarf Gemini's ?

People need to understand that just because you have users of product x, that doesn't mean you can just swoop in and convert them to product y even if you stuff it in their faces. Yes it's better than starting from scratch but that's about it. In the consumer LLM space, Open AI have by far the biggest brand and these mega conglomerates need to beat that and not the other way around. AI features in Google mail is not going to make people stop using GPT anymore than Edge being bundled in Windows will made people stop using Chrome.

For the average person, what's the most serious / valuable use of ChatGPT right now? It's stuff like writing essays, composing emails, planning tasks. This is precisely the context in which Google has a foothold. You don't need to open ChatGPT and then copy-and-paste if you have an AI button directly in the text editor or in the email app.

What's shoehorned about LLMs in a messaging app? This kind of casual conversation is a significant amount of LLM usage? Open AI says non-work queries account for about 70% of ChatGPT usage. They say that '“Practical Guidance,” “Seeking Information,” and “Writing”' are the 3 mot common topics, so really, how is it shoehorned to place this in Facebook ? [0]

>For the average person, what's the most serious / valuable use of ChatGPT right now? It's stuff like writing essays, composing emails, planning tasks. This is precisely the context in which Google has a foothold. You don't need to open ChatGPT and then copy-and-paste if you have an AI button directly in the text editor or in the email app.

Lol I don't know what else to tell you but that really doesn't matter, but it's not like you have to take my word for it. Copilot is baked in the Microsoft Office Suite. The Microsoft Office Suite dwarfs Google Docs, Sheets etc (yes even for students) in terms of usage. What impact has this had on Open AI and chatGPT ? Absolutely nothing.

[0] https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/

I've never once seen Meta AI.

All of these teens use Microsoft Word instead of Google Word, Microsoft NetMeeting instead of Google NetMeeting, Microsoft Hotmail instead of Google Mail, etc.

I’m sure far fewer people go to MSN Search than to Google.com, but Microsoft has Windows integrated into all of these products, and it’s part of people’s workflows at school and at work.

That this bonfire is an industry standard has to be embarrassing for Microsoft.

Google Docs, Google Meet and Gmail provide a tiny fraction of Google's overall revenue. And they're hardly integrated in with Google's humongous money maker, search, in a way that matters (Gmail has ads but my guess is that its direct revenue is tiny compared to search - the bigger value is the personalization of ads that Google can do by knowing more about you).

> I'm sure that far fewer people to go gemini.google.com than to chatgpt.com, but Google has LLMs seamlessly integrated in each of these products, and it's a part of people's workflows at school and at work.

But the product isn't "LLMs", the product is really "where do people go to find information", because that is where the money to be made in ads is.

I definitely don't think that OpenAI "winning" means Google is going anywhere soon, but I do agree with the comments that OpenAI has a huge amount of advertising potential, and that for a lot of people, especially younger people, "ChatGPT" is how they think of gen AI, and it's there first go-to resource when they want to look something up online.

I don't understand your argument here. Like Chrome and Android, these products exist to establish foothold, precisely so that Microsoft or OpenAI can't take Google's lunch.

My point is that brand recognition doesn't matter: if you can get equivalent functionality the easy way (a click of a button in Docs), you're not going to open a separate app and copy-and-paste stuff.

All of this will make it harder for OpenAI to maintain moat and stop burning money. Especially when their path to making money is to make LLMs worse (i.e., product placement / ads), while Google has more than enough income to let people enjoy untainted AI products for a very long time.

Even for search, right now, I'm pretty sure there are orders of magnitude more people relying on Google Search AI snippets than on ChatGPT. As these snippets get better and cover more queries, the reasons to talk to a chatbot disappear.

I'm not saying it's a forgone conclusion, but I think that OpenAI is at a pretty significant disadvantage.

I couldn't disagree more with this statement. So far I've seen companies trying to shoehorn AI into all these existing apps and lots of us hate it. I want Docs to be Docs - even if I'm writing some sort of research paper on a topic, I still don't want to do my research in Docs, because they're two completely separate mental tasks for me. There have been legions of failed attempts to make "everything and the kitchen sink" apps, and they usually suck.

> Even for search, right now, I'm pretty sure there are orders of magnitude more people relying on Google Search AI snippets than on ChatGPT. As these snippets get better and cover more queries, the reasons to talk to a chatbot disappear.

I'm sure that's true for older people, where Google is "the default", but just look at all the comments in this thread about where younger people/teenagers go first for information. For a lot of these folks ChatGPT is "the default", as as that is Google's big fear, that they will lose a generation of folks who associate "ChatGPT" with "AI" just like a previous generation associated "Google" with "search".

Having Gemini in docs is useful, though. You can ask questions about the document without copying back and forth and context switching. Plus, it has access to the company's entire corpus, and so can understand company-specific concepts and acronyms.

Hell, I had a manager jokingly ask it for a status update meeting for another related project. According to someone actually involved with that project, it actually gave a good answer.

That's all that matters now. We've passed the "good enough" bar for llms for the majority of consumer use cases.

From here out it's like selling cellphones and laptops

Literally nobody but nerds know what a Claude is among many others.

ChatGPT has name recognition and that matters massively.

Very few of those 700,000,000 active users have ever heard of Claude or DeepSeek or ________. Gemini maybe.

Would have agreed with you untill I saw the meltdown of people losing their "friend" when chatgpt 5 was released. Somehow openai has fallen into a "sticky" userbase.

Switching would be like coding with a brand new dev environment. Can I do it? Sure, but I don't want to.

When I think as a “normal” user, I can definitely see difference between them all.

but migration of all this personal knowledge / context en masse is not convenient.

and i’m sure openai won’t make it easy to escape the little labyrinth they’re building for us

Google have never had a viable competitor. Their moat on Search and Ads has been so incredibly hard to beat that no one has even come close. That has given them an immense amount of money from search ads. That means they've appeared to be impossible to beat, but if you look at literally all their other products they aren't top in anything else despite essentially unlimited resources.

A company becoming a viable competitor to Google Search and/or Ads is not something we can easily predict the outcome of. Many companies in the past who have had a 'monopoly' have utterly fallen apart at the first sign of real competition. We even have a term for it that YC companies love to scatter around their pitch decks - 'disruption'. If OpenAI takes even just 5% of the market Google will need to either increase their revenue by $13bn (hard, or they'd have done that already) or they'll need to start cutting things. Or just make $13bn less profit I guess. I don't think that would go down well though.

20 years ago everyone said the exact same thing about Google Search.

I mean, how could you possibly build a $3T company off of a search input field, when users can just decide to visit a different search input field??

Surprise. Brand is the most powerful asset you can build in the consumer space. It turns out monetization possibilities become infinite once you capture the cultural zeitgeist, as you can build an ecosystem of products and eventually a walled garden monopoly.

Doesn't look worse than Google Search's moat to me? And that worked really well for a long time.

Do people trust Google in a positive sense? I trust them to try force me to login and to spam me with adverts.

Once the single-focus companies have to actually make a profit and flip the switch from poorly monetized to fully monetized, I think folks will be immediately jumping ship to mega-companies like Google who can indefinitely sustain the freemium model. The single-focus services are going to be Hell to use once the free rides end: price hikes, stingy limits, and ads everywhere.

.... but the field will change unpredictably. Amazon offers a lot of random junk with Prime -- hike price $50/year, slap on a subscription to high-grade AI chatbot 10% of users will actually use (say 2% are "heavy users"), and now Anthropic is financially sustainable. Maybe NYT goes from $400 to $500 per year, and now you get ChatGPT Pro, so everything's fine at OpenAI. There're a ton of financial ideas you'll come up with once you feel the fire at your feet; maybe the US government will take a stake and start shilling services when you file taxes. Do you want the $250 Patriot Package charged against your tax refund, or are we throwing this in the evidence pile containing your Casio F91-W purchase and tribal tattoos?

You vastly underestimate the power of habit and branding combined together. Just like then, the vast majority of people equate ChatGPT with AI chatbot, there is no concept of alternative AI chatbot. Sure people might have seen some AI looking thing called Copilot and some weird widget in the Google Search results but so far ChatGPT is winning the marketing game even if the offerings from rivals might be the same or even superior sometimes

Here in Europe this is mitigated by them having to show a browser/search engine selection screen, but in the US you seem to be more accepting of the monopoly power. Or it seems the Judge in Calfornia seems to think that OpenAI actually has a change of winning this. It doesn't in my estimation.

On the other side Google has a monopoly on Ads. When OpenAI somehow starts displaying ads, they'd have to build their own Ad network and then entice companies and brands to use it. Good luck with that.

You can't say the same about ChatGPT. And Google wasn't spending $4 to make $1 almost 10 years after its founding, which will become an issue at some point.

Google shows the results you're looking for. At least this was true when they were in competition with the engines you mentioned, they had genuine quality advantage.

They do now, that's why they are using a shell game to pump up the stock value.

The broken record's still running, someone please turn it off!

At this point I think people just suffer from some sort of borderline mental disorder.

700 MAUs in just a couple years? In a red(-pretty-much-pure-blood) ocean? Against companies who've been in the business for 20 years?

One would have to be quite dumb or obtuse not to see it.