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Most analysts seem to forget what actual consumers do. Normal people use ChatGPT. They accidentally use Gemini when they Google something. But I don’t know anyone non-technical who has ditched ChatGPT as their default LLM. For 99% of questions these days, it’s plenty good enough—there’s just no real reason to switch.

OpenAI's strategy is to eventually overtake search. I'd be curious for a chart of their progress over time. Without Google trying to distort the picture with Gemini benchmark results and usage stats which are tainted by sheer numbers from traditional search and their apps.


We can see what consumers do. The Gemini app is second most downloaded app for the iPhone, right behind OpenAI. Apple is certainly not trying to "distort the picture" as you evidently wish to believe that Google is doing.

That's hardly an indication that actual "non-technical" consumers don't care, or that there is any sort of barrier to either using both apps or using whichever is better at the moment, or whichever is more helpful in generating the meme of the moment.

If it were actually true that OpenAI was "plenty good enough" for 99% of questions that people have, and that "there is no reason to switch" then OpenAI could just stop training new models, which is absurdly expensive. They aren't doing that, because they sensibly believe that having better models matters to consumers.


The average consumer has no idea what Gemini is, just ask some random people on the street or in your grocery store.

I would make a bet than if you asked 100 random people, only 10 would even know what Gemini is. I know amongst my friendship group who are all fairly technical, white-collar type educated workers, everyone uses ChatGPT, no one uses Anthropic or Gemini. I am the only one who uses all three.

The app downloads are meaningless honestly. As far as the consumer market and awareness goes OpenAI won, and I don't see anyone else getting close, which is why Anthropic is just doubling down on the coding/enterprise market.


> usage stats which are tainted by sheer numbers from traditional search and their apps.

You're looking at this backwards. Being able to push Gemini into your face on Gmail, Gdocs, Google Search, Android, Android TV, Android Auto and Pixel devices sure is: Annoying, disruptive and unfair. But market-wise., it sure is a strength, not a weakness.


And it is “fair” that a company can gain market share while losing billions backed by VC funding?


> But I don’t know anyone non-technical who has ditched ChatGPT as their default LLM.

Google are giving away a year of Gemini Pro to students, which has seen a big shift. The FT reported today[0] that Gemini new app downloads are almost catching up to ChatGPT

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/8881062d-ff4f-4454-8e9d-d992e8e2c...


Yes and more normal people use Google - that is the default search engine for Android and iOS. AI overviews and AI mode just have to be good enough to cause people not to switch.

Google’s increasing revenues and profits and even Apple hinting at they aren’t seeing decreased revenue from their affiliation with Google hints at people not replacing Google search with ChatGPT.

Besides end user chatbot use is just a small part of the revenue from LLMs.


I don't think that's a distorted picture at all. Google is still handling billions of searches per day. A huge number of those include AI answers. To all those billions of people who still reach for the omnibar first, Gemini is becoming their LLM of first resort.


As someone behaving non techy I tend to chat to the Google AI just because it's there if you type something in the search bar, rather than having to go to OpenAIs website.


I like Google Search for simple searches and still use it all the time. But for "complex" searches that are more like research, ChatGPT is actually pretty good, and provides actual, working links whereas Gemini seems to hallucinate more (in my experience).


A company replacing domestic workers by cheaper H1-B workers. As opposed to a company shutting down because foreign competitors took their marketshare. In either case, domestic company is not competitive. Protectionism won't make the domestic company more competitive.


Our support team shares a Gmail inbox. Gemini was not able to write proper responses, as the author exemplified.

We therefore connected Serif, which automatically writes drafts. You don't need to ask - open Gmail and drafts are there. Serif learned from previous support email threads to draft a proper response. And the tone matches!

I truly wonder why Gmail didn't think of that. Seems pretty obvious to me.


From experience working on a big tech mass product: They did think of that.

The interesting thing to think about is: Why are big mass audience products incentivized to ship more conservative and usually underwhelming implementations of new technology?

And then: What does that mean for the opportunity space for new products?


I often write in Frenglish (French and English). Apple auto-complete gets so confused and is utterly useless. ChatGPT can easily switch from one language to another. I wish the auto-complete had ChatGPT's power.


Scott Manley has a great video explaining what he thinks happened. https://youtu.be/ISZTTEtHcTg?si=0LZFyiCysBiFZrMz


Scott Manley and I agree that altitude signal shouldn't matter if navigation is correct. Athena simply risked touchdown, and it didn't find a flat spot, it found a hole.

https://youtu.be/ISZTTEtHcTg&t=1158


Can you quote the bit you think is relevant here?

He's saying modern spacecraft can null out the horizontal velocity to land, but without an altimeter, you don't necessarily know when to do so, nor when to give the thrusters a little boost to avoid an obstacle you're about to hit, like a plateau.


Does anyone know an extension that strips this tracking information and normalizes YouTube URLs?



Just in case, I’m using my own violentmonkey scripts rather than hoping for extensions, and everyone can do that too (now only on firefox, I guess, and maybe brave).

For example, I remove &t=<n> from urls that youtube added recently in addition to regular watch position restoration. This broke it for me and they don’t seem to plan a revert.


That is also used if you want to share a video at a particular timestamp with someone. E.g. check this out it happens 40s in. YouTube.com....&t=40s


A little downside, yeah, but these scripts can be easily toggled. What can't be easily done is finding my last timestamp in a 5h long vod when &t-in-history screws it up.


tldw: speculation: landed with too much lateral velocity and one of legs broke


I see Laravel Cloud as devops as a service.

I run a B2B SaaS on Laravel and this was a dream of mine for many years. Laravel + Vuejs is sufficient to cover 99% of features we need to build and scale our business. I want my devs to build features, not infrastructure.

I'm looking forward to playing with Laravel Cloud and do hope we can migrate our production environment to it one day.


This moment has finally arrived. Been expecting it. Will this translate in a massive decrease in capex expenditure and the demise of NVIDIA? Will this deflate the AI bubble we are living in?


You can always refactor. Sure it takes time and effort but it is possible. And it serves as a good painful experience to invest more on design first, to your point :)


The fundamental question is how to monetize AI?

I see 2 paths: - Consumers - the Google way: search and advertise to consumers - Businesses - the AWS way: attrack businesses to use your API and lock them in

The first is fickle. Will OpenAI become the door to the Internet? You'll need people to stop using Google Search and rely on ChatGPT for that to happen. Will become a commodity. Short term you can charge a subscription but long term will most likely become a commondity with advertising.

The second is tangible. My company is plugged directly to the OpenAI API. We build on it. Still very early and not so robust. But getting better and cheaper and faster over time. Active development. No reason to switch to something else as long as OpenAI leads the pack.


That's like saying "how do you monetize the internet?"

There are so many ways, it makes the question seem nonsensical.

Ways to monetize AI so far:

Metered APIs (OpenAI and others)

Subscription products built on it (Copilot, ChatGPT, etc.)

Using it as a feature to give products a competitive edge (Apple Intelligence, Tesla FSD)

Selling the hardware (Nvidia)


20 years ago people asked that exact question. E-Commerce emerged. People knew the physical process of buying things would move online. Took some time. Sure, more things emerged but monetizing the Internet still remains about selling you something.

What similar parallel can we think of for AI?


Assuming AI progress continues, AI could replace both Microsoft's biggest product, OS, and Google's biggest product, search and ads. And there is a huge tail end of things autonomous driving/flying, drug discovery, robotics, programming, healthcare etc.


Too vague. How would it replace Windows? How would it replace search?

The latter is more believable to me, but how would the AI-enhanced version generate the additional revenue that its costs require? And I think a lot of improvement would be required... people are going to be annoyed by things like hallucinations while trying to buy products.

In reality, as soon as a competitor shows up, Google will add whatever copycat features it needs to search. So it isn't clear to me that search is a market that can be won, short of antitrust making changes.


You saw "Her" or Iron man? That's how it could replace windows. Basically entire OS working in natural language. Imagine a great human personal assistant who operates computer for you.

And searchGPT could replace Google. Also, wasn't the point of genAI is that it is cheaper than the entire stack of search? At least I know for some recommendation GPT-4 is literally cheaper than many companies in house models and I know companies who saved money using GenAI.

Not saying any of these would likely happen, but still it is not in the fantasy realm.

> people are going to be annoyed by things like hallucinations

That's like saying people are going to be annoyed by no delivery in online shopping. Yes it happened more often earlier, but we are arguing more on the ideal case if it could get solved. That's why I said if AI progress is good in my message, which means we solve hallucination etc.


OK, then I'm pretty sure it won't happen. I don't want to have a personal assistant replace an OS. I don't even want to talk to Alexa. And I'm not alone...


I meant human personal assistant as I was clear in previous post. If you are given human personal assistant for free who could replace your screen usage, would you be open to replace your OS with it?

Also we are just talking on theoretical level if AI is able to imitate human assistant(which I personally give 10% chance of happening, but not out of realm of possibility).


They'll be selling overpriced licenses per computer to every fortune 500 company.


My guess would be using "AI" to increase/enhance sales with your existing processes. Pay for this product, get 20% increased sales, ad revenue, yada yada.


But OpenAI doesn’t lead the pack. How do you determine when to switch or when to just keep going with (potentially marginally) inferior product?


Sure it does. Ask any common mortal about AI and they'll mention ChatGPT - not Claude, Gemini or whatever else. They might not even know OpenAI. But they do know ChatGPT.

Has it become a verb yet? Waiting to peole to replace "I googled how to..." with "I chatgpted how to...".


I see that a lot already. “I asked ChatGPT for a list of places to visit in Vermont and we planned our road trip around that!”


People relying on ChatGPT, or asking it for information, just confuse me.


You’re moving the goalposts a little here. In your other post you implied you were using OpenAI for its technical properties. “But getting better and cheaper and faster over time.”

Whether something has more name recognition isn’t completely related here. But if that’s what you really mean, as you state, “any common mortal about AI and they'll mention ChatGPT - not Claude, Gemini or whatever else. They might not even know OpenAI. But they do know ChatGPT,” then I mostly agree, but as an outsider it doesn’t seem like this is a robust reason to build on top of.


OpenAI's sole focus is serving AI to consumers and businesses. I trust them more to remain backwards compatible over time.

Google changed their AI name multiple times. I've built on them before and they end of lifed the product I was using. Zero confidence Gemini will be there tomorrow.


There would need to be significant capabilities that openai doesn't have or wouldn't be built on a short-ish timeline to have the enterprise switch. There's tons of bureaucratic work going on behind the scenes to approve a new vendor.


I don't see how you charge enough for the second path to make the economics work.


In 2024, with Microsoft and Google providing built-in anti-virus and anti-malware tools, is there such a place for third-party anti viruses?


I just live with Windows Defender (heavily modified via GPO to disable sample submission and auto-remediation) these days as there is no such thing as a pure third-party antivirus product anymore. Avast (and basically all others) want to do things like install their own "safe" browser, MITM https connections by installing certificates in the root CA store, screw with firewall settings, etc which I absolutely do not want happening on my system.

All I really need is something that will hook into the filesystem layer and scan files as they are accessed/written/executed and gives me a clear UI that allows me to choose what happens if it detects something.


The problem is that all this security junk is compensating for lacks of features on OSes.

Thus as OSes have improved, and created bad incentives for those products to stay in business.


Some antiviruses are better than others, some are faster than others, prices are different (some are free), support is different.

See virustotal.com when sending a file, how many engines will find something, how many will miss, and how many will tell you that malware has been detected on a clean file.


Some of the third party EDRs do things than even the top tier Microsoft Defender XDR with Vulnerability Management can't do yet, and there is no "built-in" EDR for Linux.

Third party security tools have always been monkey patches for gaps in the OS. Eventually the OS gets the features that the third parties have, but then new threats create new requirements.

Whether you need it or not is a question for your threat model, but for me personally it's been years since I felt it was worth it on Windows. I still use a commercial EDR system on Linux due to the OSS solutions being quite lacking.


Part of the gap that still exists is cost. A cloud service that isn't constrained by your local resources can do more as far as password cracking or applying AI to the password protected document/container problem, but we're not at a point where they're going to apply that to every hotmail or gmail account for free.


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