Comment by gtirloni
2 days ago
> Meta has 3.5 billion users and projected ~$200b revenue in 2025.
Meta has WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook to account for that.
OpenAI has ChatGPT (not a social platform).
It seems to me you're comparing apples and oranges here.
You didn't state reasons why not being a social platform matters here.
Anyways, check this out: https://openai.com/index/group-chats-in-chatgpt/
I don't think so. 1 billion users and a clear intention to deliver ads with an immense amount of data on users. That's a clear threat to both Meta and Google.
PS. That's why Meta and Google are all in on AI. OpenAI is an existential threat to both in my humble opinion.
> You didn't state reasons why not being a social platform matters here.
There's nothing to pointlessly waste your time on. You open it to do a thing, you either do the thing or get frustrated or leave. Social networks are designed to waste your time even when they outlive their usefulness, therefore they can serve you more ads.
You could argue Google is the same as ChatGPT in that regard, but that's why Google has Adsense in almost any search result you click on.
As for your group chats feature argument, anyone can make a social network, that's the easy part. Getting friend groups to switch is the more difficult part.
> PS. That's why Meta and Google are all in on AI. OpenAI is an existential threat to both in my humble opinion.
They're all in on AI because that's what their investors want them to do to "not be left behind". Meta was all in Metaverse. And on a cryptocurrency before that (Diem). And on Free Basics before that. The fact that none of those succeeded didn't hurt them at all precisely because they had an infinite money glitch known as ads.
They can afford to waste amounts of money equivalent to a yearly budget of a small country, ChatGPT can't.
>There's nothing to pointlessly waste your time on.
Like Google Search, this does not really matter. Fact is, chatgpt is the 5th most visited site on the planet every month. And it happened in about 3 years. 'Nothing to waste your time on?' Completely irrelevant.
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> You didn't state reasons why not being a social platform matters here.
The network effects matter so much more for a social platform than a chat bot. The switching costs for a user are much lower, so users can move to a different one much easier.
How sticky will chat bots prove to be in the long term? Will OpenAI be able to maintain a lead in the space in the long term, the way Google was over Bing? It's possible, but it's also pretty easy to imagine other providers being competitive and a landscape where users move between different LLMs more fluidly
Another reason why social media matters is that people actually spend their free time in all those feeds. On the other hand, using LLMs is much more oriented towards specific utilities. Having 1B users who visit you once a day to ask for an email proofread will not make you profitable.
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I think Google is the much bigger threat. I've more or elss stopped using ChatGPT now, it's easier to just type the question directly into Google and get the response from their AI rather than navigating to chatgpt first. Anecdotal but I don't see anything long term keeping people on that site.
Google makes over a billion of its ad Revenue from search. Intent works.
But I think Open AI is not a slam dunk for Ads. Gemini and AI mode will compete for the same budget, and Google's Ad machine is polished.
I think eventually you will buy Ads for Open AI in Google's marketing platforms, just like most people buy bing ads in Google.
OpenAI knows my intent better than Google.
I'm telling it nearly everything from my work problems to health problems to love life problems to product research, traveling plans, etc.
Problem is the day Google puts a similarly priced and more powerful chatbot similar to ChatGPT and powered by Gemini most users will switch without a second thought, and Google will get all that data about their personal life too. OpenAI having a free tier with powerful models is unsustainable, brand loyalty is a joke at this stage, people will not bother going to ChatGPT if the search bar in their browser starts a discussion with Google. I’m sure big players like Google know OpenAI is a temporary scheme to get free money, they are surfing along now but they are playing the long game.
I wanna push back on this a little, sure, openAI has a certain level of detail in it's dataset because of the fact that you actually have conversations with it in order to use their product, but we're talking about a short window of time since the inception of ChatGPT. Google has all your searches (if you use google.com) and all of your browsing history (if you use a chromium based browser) and all of your emails (if you use gmail.com) and they have been adding to this dataset for a lot longer. Personally I stopped using google.com and I have tried my hardest to avoid Chromium-based web-browsers in the last 5-10 years but they still have a hefty dataset of all of my actions before that or when I'm on a (work) computer that forces me to use their systems. Because of this I'm not entirely sure OpenAI knows my intent better than Google, purely based on amount of data processed.
Google and Meta know your intent without you even telling them...
That's different than intent.
Your intent is the immediate need: how do I fix this leaky faucet?
Your user profile (love life problems) is generally not useful there.
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Maybe, but OpenAI only get the data you decide to type into ChatGPT in a vibe therapy session or whatever, and they have to burn a load of GPU time to keep you feeding it more slop.
Google just passively collects email and browsing history, much better data for targeting ads and way less cost to run.
Yeesh
You do not understand how online ads work. Please just stop.
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> It seems to me you're comparing apples and oranges here.
apart from those oranges have ~100bn a year to spend on rnd and still make a profit, where as openai doesn't
So yes, it is apples to oranges. but its reality.
I think the play here for OpenAI is they will eventually acquire reddit and that will be their first intro into a social platform.
Then they will have a social platform that they will continue to use to mine AI training data from + a source of ad revenue.