Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue.

My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. There are no network effects for sure, but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Understandable that it would be hard to get majority of these free users to pay for anything, and hence, advertising seems a good bet. You couldn't have thought of a more contextual way of plugging in a paid product.

I think OpenAI has better chance to winning on the consumer side than everyone else. Of course, would that much up against hundreds of billions of dollars in capex remains to be seen.

I think you're right up to a point.

Cultural defaults seem unchangeable but then suddenly everyone knows, that's everyone knows, that OpenAI is passé.

Open AI has a real chance to blow their lead, ending up in a hellish no-man's land by trying to please everyone: Not cool enough for normies, not safe enough for business, not radical enough for techies. Pick a lane or perish.

Not owning their own infrastructure, and being propped up by financial / valuation tricks are more red flags.

Being a first mover doesn't guarantee getting to the golden goose, remember MySpace.

In theory you can export your data from ChatGPT under Settings > Data Controls. In practice, I tried this recently and the download link was broken. Convenient bug I must say.

> The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue.

People used to suggest this about MySpace.

> Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness.

I think you're underestimating how fickle consumers are, and how much their choices are based on fashion and emotion. A couple more of these, and OpenAI will find itself relegated to the kids' table with Grok and Perplexity. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/15/1121900/gpt4o-gr...

It would literally take you 5 mins to set up your wife with a competing client for her needs.

Sure it's 'sticky' at least a little, but it's not a moat. A moat is a show stopper like they own you.

Yahoo, altavista, askjeeves, Google

Friendster, MySpace, Facebook

Netscape, ie, chrome

Icq, aim, MSN messenger, a million other chat apps

First mover advantage doesn't last long

Very high chance that the winner in five years is a company that does not yet exist

> My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else.

Ads might change that. If we know anything, nobody beats Google with ad based monetization. OAI is absolutely correct to be scared.

> The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue.

> My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else.

Is she paying for it? Because as we have seen repeatedly in the past, paid products whither and die when Microsoft bundles a default replacement.

You need to provide a really good reason why this time its different.

OpenAI is already building complex user models. And I mean, super detailed user models - where you are from, what you do, what are your most vulnerable weaknesses, what you care about the most and everything else. This is information even the world's largest advertising company would struggle to put together across their fragmented eco-system (Gmail, Search, etc), but OpenAI has all this on a silver platter. And that scares me, because, a lot of people use ChatGPT as a therapist. We know this because of their advertising intent which they've explicitly expressed. Advertising requires good user models to work (so advertisers can efficiently target their audience) and it is the only way to prove ROI to the advertisers. "But, OpenAI said they won't do targeted ads..". Remember, Google said "Don't be evil" once upon a time too..

That's ok, we use ChatGPT only for coding. We should be good, right? Umm, no. They already explicitly expressed the intention to take a percentage of your revenue if you shipped something with ChatGPT, so even the tech guys aren't safe.

"As intelligence moves into scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge. Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created. That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path."

"Intelligence will follow the same path."

https://openai.com/index/a-business-that-scales-with-the-val...

So yes, OpenAI has the best chance to win on the consumer side than anyone else. But, that's not necessarily a good thing (and the OpenAI fanboys will hate me for pointing this out).

Isn't half the appeal of AI that they can write a prompt like move all my text history from OpenAI to Claude and then they do it?

> people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere.

I just asked it to build me a searchable indexed downloaded version of all my conversations. One shot, one html page, everything exported (json files).

I’m sure I could ask Claude to import it. I don’t see the moat.

Anecdata point: I canceled my ChatGPT pro subscription last year over some shitty thing Altman did at OpenAI and easily moved over to Claude. The only thing I took with me was the system prompt or whatever it's called, I couldn't care less about my conversation history. I'm planning to do the same thing with my Claude subscription if Anthropic kowtows to the Pentagon. These services are not sticky at all IMO.

My wife uses Google AI overview - as an extension of search - on a daily basis and then jumps to Gemini

How much is your wife paying for the privilege to use OAI presently?

I commute on the train, I see students studying with it. I go for brunch on the weekend, I see parents consulting it while at the table with their infants. I'm at work, colleagues are using it all day. I leave work and I overhear the random woman smoking in the alleyway talking on her cellphone saying "so I asked chatgpt". It's mind-bogglingly pervasive, the last time something had such a seizmic cultural impact like this was I dunno, Facebook? And secondly, it's all one specific brand. I'm not encountering co-pilot or gemini in the meat-space.

Yup this is just another case of the HN bubble. I polled a bunch of non technical friends recently who I know use AI on a daily basis. Out of 10+ maybe 2 had ever heard of Claude, and no one had any interest in trying it.

ChapGPT has become the AI verb, and in the consumer space it is not getting dethroned.