Comment by famouswaffles
3 days ago
>However if OpenAI start trying to make money off those users by adding advertising, or removing the free tier, then things may change.
Tech forums tend to be in a bit of a bubble. People said the same thing about Netflix and it just quickly became their most popular sub. People don't care about advertising unless it's really obnoxious.
The idea that people will unsub en masse once Open AI starts rolling ads is a pipe dream. And the kind of user that won't pay and won't suffer some ads is the kind of user nobody wants.
Customers come back to Netflix since they have the best content out of all the streaming providers. This is their moat.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, is literally exactly identical to their competitors for the most common use cases.
Customers stay at Netflix because it's cheap, what they're used to, and it has enough on the catalogue to keep people satisfied most of the time. They're not constantly evaluating who has the better catalogue. And most of that catalogue is content they have no real ownership of anyway, at least, until the WB buyout is finalized.
And Netflix is hardly the only example. Like clockwork, people here say the same thing about anyone including ads, to the same result - No-one cares.
This is just one of those things that is popular to say in these kinds of forums but has no bearing in real life. Most people are sticky with products they're satisfied with. They don't switch unless a competitor is:
- much cheaper
- much better
Neither of these is the case in the LLM consumer space. Nobody cares or notices that gemini topped the benchmarks for a couple months before being dethroned, and as far as new features and improvements is concerned, Open AI is the clear leader. All everyone did and still does is follow their lead, even down to the pricing model. Basically every single feature/model improvement you can think of in the LLM consumer space is something Open AI brought first and they get almost all the buzz from it.