Comment by simianwords
11 hours ago
It’s strange to see extreme amount of hysteria on this. There’s enough market competition to not allow this.
If ChatGPT is doing it then just move to Claude. If all are doing it then surely opensource models are a good alternative.
But i think leaning into the hysteria provides some comfort
All the competition now is VC dollars. And the last round that OpenAI and Anthropic landed will probably be their last at favorable rates.
Oxide just closed a funding round they took solely to be able to guarantee their longevity as a vendor in order to land sales. That feels a lot like a harbinger of the easy money drying up very soon, and trying to get in before the door is locked.
The valuations are ridiculous now, which means the expectations are as well. Expectations are expensive.
While it isn't a perfect comparison, streaming platforms that have ad-subsidized subscriptions with ads (as the name suggests) certainly haven't been driven out by market competition.
I believe hysteria in this case is healthy, so we can end up with something closer the still fairly reasonable implementation of the streaming platforms, instead of the example here.
> streaming platforms that have ad-subsidized subscriptions with ads (as the name suggests) certainly haven't been driven out by market competition
which ones don't have an ad free tier?
YouTube didn't have an ad-free tier for a very long time
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It's interesting to contrast this take with the opinions expressed on an earlier thread about OpenAI's moat (or lack thereof).
Several people pointed to Google Search as an example of "user count as moat", and an explanation of its continued dominance despite a results page dominated by "sponsored" results.
Presumably the same reasoning would apply here.
Assuming chatgpt has moat, what kind of moat would apply that it is so crucial that it won't allow people to move away from it?
OP's point is the same can be said about Google (search).
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Reminds me of those absurd “selling web sites & apps like cable channels” graphics from the Net Neutrality wars.
This one apparently originated at Reddit, natch:
https://cordcutting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/quink.png
I don’t think it was all that absurd. IIRC Portugal was already flirting with a system like that at the time.
ISP’s wanted websites to pay them a fee in order to be accessible or at least not throttled, while also wanting customers to pay a fee to access sites/access them without being throttled. At least that’s how I remember it, it has been quite some time since I really went down that rabbit hole.
> There’s enough market competition to not allow this.
Why do people think it will NOT happen? There are tons and tons of examples out there where it happened exactly like this over and over again. Why would AI suddenly be the exception?
It's really not about competition. It's about who gets the users first and/or does the best marketing
You seem to not have known the Altavista/Yahoo/Terra/AskJeeves/Lycos/InfoSeek era of search engines. There was enough market competition to not allow for ads to appear on every search.
And then, BANG!
We didn't see the majority switch from Google to Duckduckgo because of ads or privacy... Being the "default" brings network effects that is hard to switch away.
there was no good way to pay for google to remove ads. do you not think that the primary reason was that people just weren't bothered by ads?
in contrast to youtube where people do pay to remove ads - like me.
You can still have 10 different providers with advertising.
Although I agree more competition will act as a counter to spoiling the experience with advertising.
It won’t when the money runs out.
The cost to train and run these things is going to lead to fewer players eventually. I suspect we end up with 2 or 3 big players in 10 years.
1. Open source models are already at Sonnnet 4.5 levels. For a lot of people’s needs, that's going to be sufficient.
2. Costs will come down as more efficient AI hardware continues to roll out, and once demand eventually catches up with supply in the coming years.
3. So super low cost (or free ad-supported) options will exist, and people will only pay more (in money or ads) for superior quality.
… unless training sources become pay to play?
How is the competition making money?
Most LLM users are not techies
How does that matter? I can vibecode a ChatGPT clone in 30 min that uses gpt apis and sell it at subscription.
That's not how enshittification, vendor lock in, and network effects work. You're participating in the collective delusion that we have perfect market competition.
explain the dynamics of how enshittification would work here?
You won't get good answers asking to be spoonfed on a random discussion forum by strangers. If you're truly curious, look it up, maybe read a book by Cory Doctorow.
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People stay on the shitty platform because it is convenient and still does what they need.
See extreme-enshitification-of-already-shitty Windows vs free Linux.
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