Comment by asa400

Consumer brand quality is so massively underrated by tech people.

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.

What is Google's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here. What prevents people from just using Altavista/Yahoo/[any other search engine].

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

"At some point OpenAI's investors are going to want their money back."

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

> What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here.

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.

ChatGpt has won. I talk to all teens living nearby and they all use chatgpt and not Google.

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

>non-technical users can't tell the difference between these models at all

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.

> What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here.

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

ChatGPT (and all the competitors) are trivially sticky products: I have a lot of ongoing conversations in there, that I pick up all the time. Add more long term memory stuff — a direction I am sure they will keep pushing — and all of the sudden there is a lot of personal data that you rely on it having, that make the product better and that most people will never care to replicate/transfer. Just being the product that people use makes you the product that people will use. "the other app doesn't know me" is the moat. The data that people put in it is the moat.

Brand is the second most important moat (only shy to regulation capture).

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.

Users' chat history is the moat. The more you use it, the more it knows about you and can help you in ways that are customized to particular user. That makes it sticky, more so than web search. Also brand recognition, ChatGPT is the default general purpose LLM choice for most people. Everyone and their mom is using it.

There is definitely stickiness if you're a frequent user. It has a history of hundreds of conversations. It knows a lot about me.

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

> Normal, non-technical users can't tell the difference between these models at all, so their usage numbers are highly dependent on marketing.

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

> Google has massive distribution with world-wide brands that people already know, trust, and pay for, especially in enterprise.

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

I'm saying Google is going to win. They're not beholden to their current architecture as much as other shovelmakers and can pivot their TPU to offer the best inference perf/$. They also hold about as much personal data as anyone else and have plenty of stuff to train on in-house. I work for a competitor and even I think there's a good chance google "wins"(there's never a winner because the race never ends).

Yeah, for me, the biggest issue is, counter-intuitively given it's Google, I know Gemini is going to continue existing as a product for a long time; I feel comfortable storing data and building things out for it. Anthropic's putting out great models, but it's financially endangered, and OpenAI isn't doing great either; and I'm confident Gemini 3 release will put it right back at top-of-pack again as far as model output quality, so these little windows where I'm not using The Best are not a big deal.

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?

Currently their moat is history. Why I keep coming back to ChatGPT is it ‘remembers’ our previous chats, so I don’t have to explain things over and over again. And this history builds up over time.

What prevents people from just using Google, who can build AI stuff into their existing massive search/ads/video/email/browser infrastructure?

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.

It's a distinctive brand, pleasant user experience, and a trustworthy product, like every other commodified technology on the planet.

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

Let me direct you to the reddit AMA where people were literally begging to bring back 4o.

Chats have contexts. While search engines try to track you it is spookier because it is unclear to the user how the contexts are formed. In chats at least the contexts are transparent to both the provider and the user.

Brand. Brand. Brand!

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

ChatGPT has name recognition and that matters massively.

> There's no product stickiness here.

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

> What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here.

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.

AI has been incredibly sticky. Look at the outrage, OpenAI couldn't even deprecate 4o or whatever because it's incredibly popular. Those people aren't leaving OAI if they're not even leaving a last gen model.