Comment by ForHackernews
19 hours ago
> You buy an iPhone even though the cheap-o Wal-Mart Android phone for $100 "does the same thing".
People buy iPhones because of status signalling and network effects, neither of which appears to apply to AI model choice. LLMs are already rapidly on the way to being interchangeable commodities.
No they don't, it's not 2008. Anybody off the street can get an iPhone or a free iPhone with a mobile plan. They're commodity products. Even homeless people have them.
To the extent LLMs are commodity products you're right (so far), but that is limited to the main model providers, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, &c. with interoperability on cloud platform providers and other technology providers like an Apple offering you a choice of LLM with Siri or something.
If you want to suggest that some other model is in the same bucket as those primary 3, it goes back to the crappy, cheap phone analogy which is accurate. Yea you can make calls with it, but you make calls better with an iPhone.
> free iPhone with a mobile plan
I get your point but in what sense is that "free"? What mobile plan giving you an iphone doesn't come with explicit debt?
Here's an example from 2025 with a major US carrier - Verizon: https://tech.yahoo.com/phones/deals/articles/want-free-iphon...
They run various schemes like this all the time, you can also trade in your existing phone a lot of times for pretty favorable terms. I've traded in phones that were a few years old and gotten $1000+ for them, especially when switching providers.
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Ironically you are participating in the social signalling ("crappy, cheap phone") phenomenon you claim doesn't exist.
https://mashable.com/article/apple-messages-green-doj
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/apple-green-bubble-messa...