This article says something that seems very false to me once you step outside of the developer sphere:
> Most LLM users seem willing to change from Chat-GPT to Claude, for example.
Talk to people who aren't engineers and it's all ChatGPT. Many don't even know about the concept of an LLM or a provider, just literally "ChatGPT". The South Park episode where they parody this stuff? They call it ChatGPT. The stuff students use every year to help with homework? ChatGPT. The website that "chat.com" redirects to? ChatGPT. And cai has cornered to market on horny/lonely male teens.
The moat here is the broader consciousness that a very very large population of people have adopted. Articles like this take something technical -- the cost of switching over to an LLM, which is cheap -- as an assumption that it will happen, without taking into account just how difficult it is to change social forces.
This doesn't mean ChatGPT will forever be what people use. Maybe it will fail spectacularly in a year. But it's OpenAI's game to lose here, not the other way around.
The general public doesn't care to understand the difference between "LLM" and "ChatGPT" any more than they care to understand the difference between "web browser" and "Chrome". Most people will happily use whatever you put in front of them, and if the product is bad, they'll generally grumble and shrug their shoulders in learned helplessness rather than do the research necessary to switch to a better alternative. Discerning consumers are a rounding error.
Which is to say, the platform holders will determine who wins and loses. ChatGPT will win if they pay sufficient fealty to Microsoft, Google, and Apple.
I'd say it's more like kleenex. Lots of people ask you to 'pass them a kleenex' when their nose is runny, but they just mean tissue. They don't actually care what the brand is. Similarly for LLMs most people may not care (or maybe they will, and it will be more like Google search), especially if they just use it via some other app that calls LLM provider APIs. My anecdata so far says early adopters try multiple LLM providers and use the best one for their use-case. No clue on what non-tech folks think though.
Your argument is essentially "no one will buy generic tissue when everyone calls it Kleenex". That's only powerful when ChatGPT is free. When there's price pain, we can see people adopting alternatives.
Branding is a moat but it's not a deep moat. Branding ironically works best (most profitablye) for incidental things that people exhibit to others - designer clothing is the most obvious - and this is because then brands have a social aspect (there's also branding a real signal of real superior quality - I'd buy a good brand of drill 'cause I have a rational reason to expect better quality but maintaining the quality of a branded product is more costly and hence less profitable than maintain the pure image of something like Coke and LLMs turn out not to really differentiate on quality). Whether they call LLMs "ChatGPTs" or not, people use LLMs for a result - they'll use a different LLM that gives equivalent result if they're motivated to do so. No one else is going to what brand of "ChatGPT" someone "drives", etc.
Let's do an opposite question. What's Google's moat? What's Apple's moat? All I hear from everyone is "X is not a moat", which while true doesn't mean company couldn't be ahead of the competition forever.
> Most LLM users seem willing to change from Chat-GPT to Claude, for example
There is some nuance to this. If you're building an application that embeds an LLM, then your "user" might be a prompt engineer, not necessarily the user using the application. It just so happens you can use the embedded magic using the prompt yourself.
Not a single mention of Chat-GPT or Claude, but if you google you'll see they use Claude under the hood. So I would argue the branding is actually "AI" not ChatGPT.
It's a bit like Crypto and Bitcoin. Not all Crypto is bitcoin, but all bitcoin uses crypto to power it. People recognize both the branding of Crypto and Bitcoin.
It seems like the points you're making are in support of the statement you are quoting - if most people don't know the concept of an LLM or a provider, why would that make it difficult for them to switch? Seems like ChatGPT's only competitive advantage here if I am understanding what you wrote correctly is name recognition. If ChatGPT's "game" to lose here is just staying relevant in the public consciousness, it would appear to me that the main point of this article, that building LLM's is not going to be a great business, is largely correct. I would expect a company such as OpenAI with such fantastic claims they make to have some kind of technical advantage over their competitors.
If people don’t know what the LLM behind the chat service is, then it seems likely (or plausible at least) that one could easily replace the chat bot used by these services with one backed by a different LLM, right?
People just want a solution to their problem. Does a Google user care what iteration of their index engine they're using? No, they just want a picture of a god dang hot dog I tell ya hwat.
I'm one of those people—I use a variety of models but I call them all "chatgpt" (ironically, not including OpenAI's product). For the most part the model used doesn't really impact usage or quality that much, at least for my use-cases. It helps that I tend to keep my expectations very low. I think it's going to become a generic term for "llm chat bot" pretty rapidly, if it's not already metastasized.
> The moat here is the broader consciousness that a very very large population of people have adopted.
That's not nothing, but switching costs are very low, and an alternative could arise faster than the switch from Friendster to Myspace or Myspace to Facebook.
Only lock in could be if they become smart enough to truly know you and small preferences as a person that would be hard to repeat all the nuances to the next chatbot
Having masses of people using ChatGPT and not paying for it doesn't make for a successful business. The people who are willing to pay are more likely to be aware of the alternatives and choose the one best suited for their use.
For many school kids I think it's all just "AI", not "ChatGPT".
We said the same about Google, Uber, DoorDash, Facebook, TikTok, <insert any other unprofitable business that eventually became profitable>. Sure, most of them are making money through ads, but for that you need some audience. There’s absolutely survivorship bias here, but eventually it might just pan out.
Bitcoin inherently relies on buy-in for its value. It's a shared fiction that becomes real because we share it. In that regard it's similar to countries. I literally cannot switch from Bitcoin to another coin and get the same value unless we collectively do it. It's a inherent property of its usage as a currency. I can switch from ChatGPT to Claude though without anyone else doing so and I get the same value. In fact, if Claude is superior I might actually get more value than if everyone switched because I now have a leg up on everyone else.
There is no money to be made from individual users. All of the money comes from companies building something on top of the LLMs, and those of us building startups on top of LLMs are very much aware of the differences between the LLMs. And, to the point made in the article, it is trivially easy for us to switch from one LLM to another, so the LLMs don't have much of a moat and therefore they cannot charge much money.
I expect it to sort of be like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Many people started with AWS as it was first, and it leads to quite a bit of momentum in terms of market share long past when there was significant differentiators. It is just that there are switching costs and most people have already learnt AWS's APIs.
What are the significant differentiators? I have worked much of a decade in the cloud infrastructure space, and from the POV of a business owner, AWS is such a stupidly superior product that I could not even imagine considering the alternatives. Google offers mostly AWS products but "googleized," and their support is practically nonexistent. Microsoft support isn't as bad, but their products are unreliable at best (from my view) and what differentiators they do have, which to me is better support for MS products in general don't really matter to me or my business at all.
These are the big 3 so the only ones I mentioned. I know alibaba/yandex/digitalocean/etc exist but lack as much experience with them so only commented on the big 3.
I agree. The author makes the argument that airlines have a terrible business partly because consumers don't have any brand loyalty and Coca-Cola has a wonderful business partly because consumers have brand loyalty. What distinguishes those cases? Why should we consider LLMs to be more like one business or the other?
Brand loyalty might matter when the cost of a good is relatively low and the availability high. I can basically choose between coke or Pepsi anywhere, and they cost about the same, so why not go with my favorite?
For airlines availability with a preferred carrier is not guaranteed, and prices can vary wildly. Do I have so much brand loyalty that I will pay perhaps 2x the cost? Like most people, I wouldn't.
In terms of availability and cost, LLM providers are much closer to Coke than to an airline.
You are doing the thing of asking if I read the article without actually directly asking if I read the article. Please don't do that, at least without carefully reading the comment that you're replying to.
My specific point was that the article doesn't appear to support the assertions that it makes about brand loyalty.
Most people who bother to comment on HN have an interesting opinion, and I value yours.
The point of that guideline is to ensure that the conversation is substantive. Repeating points from the article with an assertion that those points are indeed in the article doesn't really add to the conversation and it's something that I do find frustrating on HN, which is why I mentioned it. I agree that it isn't a great guideline.
The major airlines very much have brand loyalty via loyalty rewards programs, lounges, and cobranded credit cards.
If you are business traveler gaining status by flying a preferred airline and using other people’s money, you aren’t going to go to the cheapest airline.
Most of the profit from the Big three airlines come from business travel and credit cards
This! I'd argue that the only reason loyalty might not always matter is because I am frequently not given a real choice because a given route likely has a very limited number of airlines offering flights and those might be dramatically different in number of stops, price and times. Air travel is one area where I frequently wonder how many benefits of it being a free market on paper we are actually getting. There is limited choice and direct competition seems limited
Yeah but early stronghold brands don't always keep the market. Before word there was WordPerfect. Before Excel there was lotus 123. Everyone swore by both but they have been dead for decades.
It's funny because ChatGPT is such a bad mainstream branding. Technical name, hard to pronounce, nobody even knows what GPT stands for. They really got overwhelmed by their own success otherwise they would have done more on the branding side to appeal to mainstream users. But their first mover advantage won't last forever.
Google users are theoretically willing to become Bing users, though I'll admit that ChatGPT is the consumer leader mostly because of brand recognition and being the first mover.
> This doesn't mean ChatGPT will forever be what people use. Maybe it will fail spectacularly in a year. But it's OpenAI's game to lose here, not the other way around.
The AVERAGE person still does not even know what ChatGPT is.
At most, 1 in 10 people have ever used ChatGPT.
This is like saying Social Networking is MySpace's to lose. Not really. Most people hadn't heard of Social Media or MySpace when MySpace was already huge and - by far - the biggest player.
It is likely easier for Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, or Google to introduce >50% of the population to an LLM than for ChatGPT to get from ~2.5% to >50%.
ChatGPT monthly users is about 1 in 40 people, by the way.
Does that mean ChatGPT is doomed to fail. No.
ChatGPT could easily be the winner.
But declaring the race over unless ChatGPT blows both its legs off seems very premature.
That's true, but that doesn't mean much as long as these particular users are free users that don't bring any money to the company (and cost a lot compared to similar users in other technology companies).
The real business is enterprise API endpoint billed by the millions of tokens, and in that particular domain OpenAI has literally zero market lock-in (and they probably depends more on Microsoft sales power than on their own brand value).
Unless OpenAI can show that they are able to make money from the mass of casual users, they are in a tough spot.
OAI has certainly positioned themselves culturally the same way as Google did for search engines. Google this, Tweet that, ask ChatGPT.
We know now how much actual competition[0] Google had after the dust had settled, in all practical terms - zero. Even after all the SEO spam and enshittification they haven't lost any notable market lead.
Time will tell if ChatGPT ends up that way but unless OAI implodes (which isn't all that unlikely) they're on the way there.
> Really though, LLM makers have only one true supplier: NVIDIA
The argument relies on the axiom that NVIDIA will have a persistent hardware advantage. Maybe they will, but even if they were always 2 years ahead of the competition, if NVIDIA-trained LLMs would 'good enough' in 2025, then non-NVIDIA-trained LLMs would be 'good enough' in 2027.
> NVIDIA will have a persistent hardware advantage
Is it a hardware advantage?
I think it probably has more to do with CUDA. The reason Python is the undisputed champion in AI and ML isn't because Python is a better, more performant programming language so much as because ecosystem of software in the AI/ML space is extremely concentrated, dense, and rich in the Python ecosystem compared to Java, Go, or C#.
Likewise, it seems like NVDAs advantage isn't even necessarily the hardware but the suite of tools and software that are built up to take advantage of that hardware.
It's definitely not CUDA advantage. If you can get Pytorch/flash attention/triton well supported in any hardware, a huge chunk of client don't care if it means cost saving. Case in point Google's TPU had extensive usage outside Google when they were cheaper for the same performance. Now that isn't the case.
The article calls out trademarks as part of the reason why soft drinks are successful. I think the impact of laws and regulations cannot be ignored for the future of LLMs either. Legal/regulatory moats make companies more profitable than they otherwise would be.
For example, in the future if you ask a model "are trans women real women" it will have to say "yes" in one country and "no" in another. In one country the LLM will have to talk about the "5000 years of Chinese history" and in another will have to say that's just an invention to feed their superiority complex.
It doesn’t technically detract from the overall point, but almost everything about airlines is wrong.
It’s incredibly difficult to start a new airline. Small and medium sized airlines are almost non existent. There is currently a pilot shortage. Most people stick with the same airline for the rewards.
I've seen the airplane/railway comparison a lot and I'm not sure I buy it.
Nvidia is currently important to training new LLMs but it's not that important to running inference on existing ones.
I think email might be a better comparison? If LLMs really do become something that everyone uses without thinking about (and at least anecdotally it's the first tech trend I've seen that all my non tech friends are using) then yes sure you can easily change provider but in reality most people are just going to use whoever wins, just like most people use Gmail.
So investors are putting in huge amounts of money to have part of the next Gmail, and many of them will lose but there will probably be some dominant player and sure you can change but once you've used one for a few years and it is as good as or equal to another, and it approximates to free, then you'll probably stick with it, compatible api and interface or not.
> Most LLM users seem willing to change from Chat-GPT to Claude, for example.
Talk to people who aren't engineers and it's all ChatGPT. Many don't even know about the concept of an LLM or a provider, just literally "ChatGPT". The South Park episode where they parody this stuff? They call it ChatGPT. The stuff students use every year to help with homework? ChatGPT. The website that "chat.com" redirects to? ChatGPT. And cai has cornered to market on horny/lonely male teens.
The moat here is the broader consciousness that a very very large population of people have adopted. Articles like this take something technical -- the cost of switching over to an LLM, which is cheap -- as an assumption that it will happen, without taking into account just how difficult it is to change social forces.
This doesn't mean ChatGPT will forever be what people use. Maybe it will fail spectacularly in a year. But it's OpenAI's game to lose here, not the other way around.
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