> What backfired?

I think it was psychological to a degree. For many consumers OpenAI, or at least ChatGPT was AI. The controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.

I agree with OP though that this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point.

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karmasimida 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.

This is true. OpenAI WAS the story of AI, now it is just 50% of it, at max. Losing the monopoly of imagination towards AGI is bad for them.

One thing I don't agree though, consumers aren't the important part of AI, they are a liability.

AI is too expensive, consumers can't pay for it. Instead they will compete with enterprise for the same tokens, with less money.

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JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors

This is my suspicion. Consumers hadn’t previously heard of Anthropic and Claude. Now they had, particularly in cities.

> this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point

Also agree. Hence why I said “I don’t think” the fight is “the ultimate cause.”

	▲	pixl97 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Anecdotally a whole lot more people around me started using Anthropic models in the last few weeks and seem to like them more than OpenAI. For many of these people it was the second provider they ever used. Of course this is part of what has lead to such insane demand and outages they've experienced since then.