Comment by rajaman0 9 hours ago
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.
I'm not sure if physical products are analogous to internet services. If all it took to vacuum your house was typing "Hoover" into a browser, and everyone called vacuums "a Hoover," then I would expect Hoover to have 90% of the vacuum market share.
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.
their own fault :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion
And "generic trademark" is the Wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark
Huh, bubble wrap, even.
when people started referring to searching the internet as googling, they know their brand has made it.
It is the same with chatGPT.
Claude is also difficult to consistently pronounce for a non-English speaker. Sometimes people dont say that because it can get misinterpreted. ChatGPT is something easy on the the tongue and very difficult to mis-pronounce.
Even I often tell I chatgeepeeteed the result, in the same fashion when I continue saying I googled the result, while actually I used Duck Duck Go. I could ask another LLM provider, but I have no idea how to communicate that properly to a non-technical folks. Heck, I don’t want to communicate that _properly_ to tech peers either. I don’t like these pedantic phrases ‘well, actually … that wasn’t Google, I used DDG for that.’ Sometimes I can say ‘web search,’ but ‘I googled that’ is just more natural thing to say.
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.
> ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand.
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.
You massively overestimate what people actually know and read about. If you are in the tech sphere these things might be obvious to you, but I assure you regular people are not keeping track as closely.
I bet at most 10 % of people in the West can name the CEO of OpenAI.
> ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand. That's worth 100x more than "product stickiness". They have 700 million weekly users
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 ;)
> They have 700 million weekly users and growing much faster than Google.
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
I read that as OpenAI’s WAU is showing a steeper increase than Google ever did. Not saying it’s factually accurate, just that it’s not a fixed point-in-time comparison :)
> ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand.
If by "phenomenal" you mean "the premier slop and spam provider", then yes.
I’ve got “normie” friends who I’d bet don’t even know that what Google has at the top of their search results is “AI” results and instead assume it’s just some extension of the normal search results we’ve all gotten used to (knowledge graph)
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.