Comment by margorczynski
2 hours ago
> whether you are locked into the Ant/OAI ecosystem or not
I think the problem (for Ant/OAI) is that there is no sensible lockin or moat. LLMs are essentially interchangeable and stuff like a harness doesn't offer enough value on its own for someone to be locked into using one of them.
Now with the onslaught of the Chinese models that offer almost the same quality for much less money they have a very serious problem on how to proceed. Investors now might be looking through rose tinted glasses but their patience has its limits.
Agreed 100% for the consumer case: an empty chatbox is just about the least sticky surface I could ever imagine. I saw a mobile interstitial ad for Kimi recently whose hook was basically "Tired of paying for expensive ChatGPT? Download the Kimi app, it's the same thing but cheaper". I myself bounce between token subscriptions like no one's business and use Pi/OMP for maximum model flexibility when coding (and it's a few env variables or lines of (TO|YA)ML|JSON to switch providers in Codex, Grok Build, CC). I even self-host and try to use OpenWebUI + CLIProxyAPI when I can for all my chats.
Enterprise is a whole different ballgame IMO with countless technical, compliance, and employee adoption considerations that add friction to switching. It's also where both Anthropic and (as of last week) OpenAI get the bulk of their revenue, and, incidentally, the venue where US Government regulations on Chinese models would have the most impact.