Comment by JumpCrisscross
3 days ago
> Their moat in the consumer world is the branding and the fact open ai has 'memory' which you can't migrate to another provider
This sounds like first-mover advantage more than a moat.
3 days ago
> Their moat in the consumer world is the branding and the fact open ai has 'memory' which you can't migrate to another provider
This sounds like first-mover advantage more than a moat.
The memory is definitely sort of a moat. As an example, I'm working on a relatively niche problem in computer vision (small, low-resolution images) and ChatGPT now "knows" this and tailors its responses accordingly. With other chatbots I need to provide this context every time else I get suggestions oriented towards the most common scenarios in the literature, which don't work at all for my use-case.
That may seem minor, but it compounds over time and it's surprising how much ChatGPT knows about me now. I asked ChatGPT to roast me again at the end of last year, and I was a bit taken aback that it had even figured out the broader problem I'm working on and the high level approach I'm taking, something I had never explicitly mentioned. In fact, it even nailed some aspects of my personality that were not obvious at all from the chats.
I'm not saying it's a deep moat, especially for the less frequent users, but it's there.
> may seem minor, but it compounds over time and it's surprising how much ChatGPT knows about me now
I’m not saying it’s minor. And one could argue first-mover advantages are a form of moat.
But the advantage is limited to those who have used ChatGPT. For anyone else, it doesn’t apply. That’s different from a moat, which tends to be more fundamental.
Ah, I guess I've been interpreting "moat" narrowly, such as, keeping your competitors from muscling in on your existing business, e.g. siphoning away your existing users. Makes sense that it applies in the broader sense as well, such as say, protecting the future growth of your business.
Sounds similar to how psychics work. Observing obvious facts and pattern matching, except in this case you made the job super easy for the psychic because you gave it a _ton_ of information, instead of a psychic having to infer from the clothes you wear, your haircut, hygiene, demeanor, facial expression etc.
Yeah, it somewhat is! It also made some mistakes analogous to what psychics would based on the limited sample of exposure it had to me.
For instance, I've been struggling against a specific problem for a very long time, using ChatGPT heavily for exploration. In the roast, it chided me for being eternally in search of elegant perfect solutions instead of shipping something that works at all. But that's because it only sees the targeted chats I've had with it, and not the brute force methods and hacks I've been piling on elsewhere to make progress!
I'd bet with better context it would have been more right. But the surprising thing is what it got right was also not very obvious from the chats. Also for something that has only intermittent existence when prompted, it did display some sense of time passing. I wonder if it noticed the timestamps on our chats?
Notably, that roast evolved into an ad-hoc therapy session and eventually into a technical debugging and product roadmap discussion.
A programmer, researcher, computer vision expert, product manager, therapist, accountability partner, and more all in a package that I'd pay a lot of money if it wasn't available for free. If anything I think the AI revolution is rather underplayed.