The field is too young to know what will keep users, but there are definitely things that plausibly could create a lock-in effect. I mentioned one ("ChatGPT knows me") which could grow over time as people have shared more of themselves with ChatGPT. There's also pilots of multi-person chats, and the social elements in Sora. Some people already feel compelled to stick to the "person" they're comfortable talking to. The chance of OpenAI finding something isn't zero.
A lot of YT's growth at the time was word of mouth and brand among the population, which is currently ChatGPT's position.
Altman knows this and why he called code red. If OpenAI hasn't produce a fully new model in 1.5 years, how much longer can they hang on before people will turn to alternatives that are technically better? How long before they could feasibly put out a new model if they are having issues in pre-training?
Their brand is not ok based on what I've heard, certainly no moat
Still feels like ChatGPT is synonymous with the current wave of generative ai
Even if they aren’t the market lead and it’s main offering is being commodified
A lot of "normal people" are learning fast about ChatGPT alternatives now. Gemini in particular is getting a lot of mainstream buzz. Things like this [1] with 14k likes are happening everyday on social. Marc Benioff's love for Gemini broke through into the mainstream also.
[1] https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1995900344224907500 [2] https://x.com/Benioff/status/1992726929204760661
But a lot of HN users use gmail, which has the same model. And there are plenty of paid email providers which seem far less popular (I use one). Ads didn't end up being a problem for most people provided they were kept independent of the content itself.
2. I’ve never seen ads on the Gmail webapp (It sure does data collection)
A funding source could make it more sustainable and/or allow more quota or bigger models for users who don't wish to pay.
Google will almost certainly be doing this with Gemini, and if ChatGPT can't offer as much it's an easy reason for people to switch.
2. It does have ads in the default interface, though they're quite unobtrusive. You might also have a blocker. But yes, I suspect their size allows them to provide it mildly "at a loss" to support their ads elsewhere.
How can a model achieve this kind of stickiness? By "knowing you"? I don't think that's the same at all. Personally, one of the reasons I prefer Claude is that it doesn't pretend to know me. I can control the context better.
YouTube was ambitious for its time. "In 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet had in 2000" but they weren't believed to start breaking even until 2015.
^1 and free users are a large majority!
The same isn't true about ChatGPT.
Anthropic and Google provides a similar product, and switching to a better/cheaper platform is fairly easy as it only depends on you and not on others (content creators or friends) doing the same.
At youtube's ad income rate (~$13/year), the current (but growing) ~800 million chatgpt users would add ~$10 billion. At facebook's rate (~$40-50/year) $32-40 billion. Potentially, an assistant would be more integrated into your life than either of those two.
The "audience retention" is the key question, not the profitability if they maintain their current audience. I've been surprised how many non-technical people I know don't want to try other models. "ChatGPT knows me".