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.

> 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.

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?

> 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.

Example: https://asana.com/product/ai

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.

This is like Bitcoin.

It's objectively a very bad crypto. It's the prototype and everything it does there is a coin that does it 100x better now.

But man, Bitcoin, that name has serious influence and staying power. It's a testament to the power of branding and being the first mover.

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.

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?

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".

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.

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.

Exactly. Reminds me of all the "technically superior" crypto coins that failed, and what ended up winning were the popular memecoins like dogecoin. There's a lot to say about distribution and what "the masses" end up adopting, whether or not it's the "better" product!

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.

ChatGPT is not just an LLM.

It is:

- Dall-e for image generation

- a real time Python interpreter that can run Python code to answer relevant questions

- can search the web to retrieve and validate information

- has the infrastructure to handle processing at scale

Just because people say "ChatGPT" doesn't mean they actually mean ChatGPT. I drink "coke" from multiple brands. I've seen people say "ChatGPT" and then actually use Bard.

Being the brand name of the industry is powerful, certainly, but it doesn't mean as much as it sounds like just based on usage numbers.

There's an interesting parallel between the subjective nature of LLMs (being blackboxes of nondeterministic output) and brands. The whole point of investing in brands is to create a moat. And maybe LLM are converging but because they are hard to predict there will always be factor that people's psyche will favour

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 insight, or lack of it, is esp surprising giving the example of how sticky the Coke brand is.

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.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

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.

ChatGPT / GPT has acquired "google it" status in the culture.

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.