Comment by aurareturn
2 days ago
OpenAI has ChatGPT (not a social platform).
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/
It seems to me you're comparing apples and oranges here.
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.
Being the most visited or the most used or the most whatever is absolutely useless information, and you should delete it from your mind.
Any idiot off the street can be the most used website on Earth. Easy - go to my website, and I give you free stuff. So why am I not a billionaire? Because that's a dumbass business model and that won't go anywhere.
The idea that if you just "flood the market" you can be successful is a crock of shit, and I think we're all starting to realize it. It's not difficult, or impressive, or laborious to provide something people want. It's difficult to do it in a way that makes money.
You might say - but what about Spotify? What about Uber? Those companies are not successful. They are just barely profitable, after investment on the order of decades. We don't actually know if a service like Spotify even works long term. It sounds fantastic - pay ten bucks or whatever and get all the music you want.
But has anyone taken a step back and asked - hmm - how do we make money off of this? Because obviously that is not the cost of music, right? And we don't own any of the capital, right? And we don't actually make a product, right, we're just a middle man?
ChatGPT is in a similar predicament. The value of ChatGPT is not the ChatGPT, it's what ChatGPT produces. It's a middle man, operating at massive losses, with absolutely no path towards profitability.
3 replies →
> 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.
But, like search, it captures intent to buy much better, while looking at feeds for internatinment does not. Adwords worked because of that, they could capture ad revenue on queries that lead to sales. The amount of extra context in AI chat is even better, as is the ability to steer the conversation to different options.
No one spends their free time on Google search either. Didn't stop Google from being even more profitable than Meta.
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.