Comment by ncallaway
2 days ago
> 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.