Comment by jeffbee

13 hours ago

For what I use them for, the LLM market has become a two player game, and the players are Anthropic and Google. So I find it quite interesting that OpenAI is still the default assumption of the leader.

Only in HN and some reddit subs I even see the name claude. In many countries AI=ChatGPT.

  • From what I've seen, 99% of people are using the free version of ChatGPT. Those who are using Claude are on the subscription, very often the $100/month one.

  • And at one point in the 90s, Internet=Netscape Navigator.

    I see Google doing to OpenAI today what Microsoft did to Netscape back then, using their dominant position across multiple channels (browser, search, Android) to leverage their way ahead of the first mover.

    • That's funny, the way I see it is Microsoft put tens of billions of dollars behind an effort to catch Google on the wrong foot, or at least make Google look bad, but they backed the wrong guy and it isn't quite going to make it to orbit.

ChatGPT dominates the consumer market (though Nano Banana is singlehandedly breathing some life into consumer Gemini).

A small anecdote: when ChatGPT went down a few months ago, a lot of young people (especially students) just waited for it to come back up. They didn't even think about using an alternative.

  • When ChatGPT starts injecting ads or forcing payment or doing anything else that annoys its userbase then the young people won't have a problem looking for alternatives

    This "moat" that OpenAI has is really weak

codex cli with gpt-5.2-codex is so reliably good, it earns the default position in my book. I had cancelled my subscription in early 2024 but started back up recently and have been blown away at how terse, smart, and effective it is. Their CLI harness is top-notch and it manages to be extremely efficient with token usage, so the little plan can go for much of the day. I don’t miss Claude’s rambling or Gemini’s random refactorings.

What do you use them for?

GPT5.2 Codex is the best coding model right now in benchmarks. I use it exclusively now.

Interestingly Claude is so far down in traffic it's below things like CharacterAI, it's the best model but it's something like 70% ChatGPT, 10% Gemini and Claude is only 1% or so