In this niche forum people keep saying “there’s no moat”. But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.
Does Coca Cola have a moat? Some company could raise $1B to create a new cola beverage that beats Coca Cola in all blind tests imaginable yet people will keep buying Coca Cola.
Did people switch search engines or social networks when Google or FB introduced ads?
I wouldn't call ChatGPT "brand recognition". People know the term ChatGPT, but I don't think they associate it with OpenAI or any company in particular, in the same way that people might associate Civic with Honda. Instead they'll associate it like they do the terms Bandaid, Kleenex, etc., as a catch-all term for LLM chat interfaces, regardless of who is providing the service. When OpenAI starts ads, I imagine people will start saying "oh, here's a ChatGPT without ads" and point to Claud or Gemini or whatever.
> But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.
Brand recognition doesn't mean a thing when it comes to a technically-illiterate audience with no control over their digital lives. In the same way that every 90s mom called a video game console a "Nintendo", everyone who gets served an LLM-generated response straight from their OS and/or browser courtesy of Google, Apple, or Microsoft will call that a "ChatGPT", and OpenAI will be powerless to stop the platform holders from intercepting their traffic.
> Hard disagree. If anything brand recognition is more important for technically illiterate.
No, the tech-illiterate gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which just means the platform defaults. OpenAI doesn't control the platform, which means they've already lost to Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Don't build your castle in someone else's kingdom.
> And this proves that point. Nintendo sales in the 1990s crushed the competitors numbers.
Clearly you know nothing about the history of the console business, because Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005, despite Nintendo's brand strength.
> No, the tech-illiterate gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which just means the platform defaults.
The path of least resistance is by way of brand recognition.
> OpenAI doesn't control the platform
OpenAI has 800mm MAUs on their own platform that they control, assuming we trust their reporting. They own chat.com, all of our grandmothers know ChatGPT - they don't know Gemini...I'm not even sure how OpenAI could have lost to Apple or Microsoft in the AI race. Those are nonsensical comparisons.
> Sony absolutely annihilated Nintendo in the home console market for the decade between 1995 and 2005
Yes you're right. If we shift the comparison window by a full 50% the numbers do favor Sony.
My point is not that OpenAI is infallible or that a competitor couldn't also be successful. Only that brand recognition is a legitimate and important factor.
I don’t disagree but want to go on the record predicting this will collapse on itself spectacularly and OpenAI will still “fail” commercially
for the Cola Cola drinkers, the product goes from an infallible AI to with no ulterior motives to another Google that’s purpose is to sell you ads, but more creepily. it’s like if Coca Cola started adding a few milliliters of bleach to their product
This isn’t backed by the constant conspiracy theories about voice assistants listening to everything you say and then farming that off to third party ad providers so that you see ads for things you’ve been discussing.
I’m not certain about that, but it’s all very abstract to people. It is also tied to their phones for most people which they’d never give up anyway.
The more direct connection on something they don’t (yet) value as much as they value their phones might be a bridge too far.
An LLM feels like a person to a lot of people. It might be surprisingly difficult to avoid people feeling betrayed or creeped out by this “person”. No one has ever done this before and it doesn’t seem easy or like a straightforward win.
It is odd how often I hear even technically people defend the idea that Instagram is listening to everything they say even while the phone is locked, sending it to Meta, and then influencing their ad delivery. You have to either have very little understanding of mobile apps and reverse engineering to believe that this is happening but nobody has been able to find proof yet.
It’s right up there with people who believe conspiracies about everyday things like chemtrails. If you really though chemtrails were disbursing toxic mind control chemicals (or whatever they’re supposed to be this week) then you’d be going to great lengths to breathe only purified air and relocate to another location with fewer flight paths. Yet the chemtrail conspiracy theorists don’t change their behavior. They just like complaining and being angry, and it’s something they can bond with other angry complainers about.
I think it’s more reasonable to consider Coca Cola as having a significant brand value moat, given that they’re 140 years old and one of the most recognizable brands in the world. That also gets at the other side of their moat: distribution. Coca Cola is available basically everywhere, and a challenger would have to invest massively to simply get in front of as many people on shelves. In that way, other companies (Google, Microsoft, Meta) still have significant legs up on OpenAI. Way too much in play right now to declare any winners.
There’s a difference between something that has existed for a few years that lots of people have heard of, and something that people have been buying their entire lives, and that their grandparents also bought for their entire lives. As to distribution—the internet certainly makes it logistically easier to get your product to consumers, but an infinitely large store shelf still means you’re competing for consumer attention, and the big players already have that attention for their existing successful products.
Don't ask them if they know the model name, ask them if they've used the ai mode in Google search or their phone or Gmail or whatever. "Oh yeah I use that all the time!" is what they usually say to me.
People say ChatGPT has brand recognition but amongst non-students and non-tech in the UK I don't think it is that pervasive at least.
Western Europe is fine, for seniors as well as newcomers, based on my own experience and friends & acquaintances. Then based on more acquaintances South America and Asia seems OK too. But again, ensure you actually understand the context here.
What does "heinous" actually mean here? I've repeated it before, but I guess one more time can't hurt: I'm not saying it isn't difficult to find a job as a developer today compared to a decade ago, but what I am saying is that it's a thing across all sectors and developers aren't hit by it worse than any other sector. Hiring freezes has been happening in not just technology companies, but across the board.
I don't see how making a language more complex can help with that. Complex languages makes sense for system programming where you want to squeeze some performance.
It's a known "issue" of reCaptcha, and many other systems like it. If it thinks you're a bot, it will "fail" the first few correct solves before it lets you through.
The worst offenders will just loop you forever, no matter how many solves you get right.
stock Chrome logged into a Google account = definitely not a bot. here, click a few fire hydrants and come on in :^)
I sincerely wish all the folx at Google directly responsible for this particular user acquisition strategy to get every cancer available in California.
I would think that when you're viewing recaptcha on a site, if you have 3rd party cookies disabled the embedded recaptcha script won't have anyway of connecting you with your Google account, even if you're logged in. At least that's how disabling 3rd party cookies is supposed to work.
Of course, if you have 3rd party cookies disabled, Google would never link your recaptcha activity to your Google account.
They just link it to your IP address, browser, operating system, screen resolution, set of fonts, plugins, timezone, mouse movements, GPU, number of CPU cores, and of course the fact you've got third party cookies disabled.
Isn't Chrome shifting to blocking 3rd party cookies by default? If that's the new default than the default behavior would be that being logged into Google isn't used as a signal for recaptcha
There'd be no way to hide this. If 3rd party cookies are disabled it's trivial to observe if an embedded google.com iframe is sending my full google.com 1st party cookies in violation of the 3rd party cookie settings. There's no pinky promises involved, you can just check what it's sending with a MITM proxy.
I'm sure they're doing other sketchy things but wouldn't make sense to lie in such a blindingly obvious way. (I just tested it, and indeed, it works as expected)
That's because Chrome tracks so much telemetry about you that Google is satisfied with how well it has you surveilled. If you install a ton of privacy extensions like Privacy Badger, uBlock, VPN extensions with information leakage protections, etc., watch that "accuracy" plummet again as it makes you click 20 traffic signals to pass one check.
I stop going to sites using that method due to this. I have no intention of proving I'm a human it I have to click several dubious images 3-4 times in a row.
It doesn't catch OpenAI even though the mouse/click behavior is clearly pretty botlike. One hypothesis is that Google reCAPTCHA is overindexing on browser patterns rather than behavioral movement
There is a doom loop mode where it doesn't matter how many you solve or even if you get them correct. My source for this works on this product at Google.
That doesn't surprise me. I find it hard to believe it's a pure coincidence that I would get stuck in the loop regularly when I'm on the university wifi but it would never happen anywhere else ever. After a dozen try, I would remote connect to my home pc and it would magically work on the first try every single time.
>Someone from your university tried to scrape data from Google.
Kinda wild that someone scraping google's data would prevent me from getting into my PAID (>90$/yr) Dropbox account. That experience is a big part of why I pay extra to host my host data on my own server now.
Yep, that's how the internet works now unfortunately.
Decentralization, hosting your own stuff, is great until you run into DDOS attacks and have to make maintaining your server a full time job. Sure you have the skills (or can acquire it), but do you have the time ?
Oh, don't worry. That's just v2. V3 uses the Google panopticon to watch your every move and decide if you're human or not that way without ever making you click on images. I'm sure you'll love it!
I have a recording of me trying to pass the captcha for straight 5 minutes and giving up. To be fair, this has only happened once.
What is the purpose of such loop? Bots can simply switch to another residential proxy when the captcha success rate gets low. For normal humans, it is literally "computer says no".
The buses and fire hydrants are easy. It is the bicycles. If it goes a pixel over the next box, do I select the next box? Is the pole part of the traffic light? And the guy as you say. There is a special place in hell for the inventor of reCaptcha (and for all of Cloudflare staff as fas as I am concerned!)
The trick is to pretend you're an idiot. If the bicycle and the person on it map mostly to a rectangle of 8 squares, most people will be so stupid or hasty that they'll click that, nevermind that a human is not part of the bicycle.
The same is true with, say, buses. See an image of a delivery van? Bus! It asks you select all cars and you see no car but a vague pixel blob that someone stupid would identify as a car? Car!
One of the few things that this doesn't work with is stairs, because the side of stairs being stairs or not is something apparently no one can agree on.
Didn't look a lot into this but I think the fact that humans are willing to do this in the "cents per thousand" or something range means that it's really hard to get much interest in automating it
Not sure it is your case but I think I sometimes had to solve many of them when I am in my daily task rush. My hypothesis is that I solve them too fast for "average human resolving duration" recaptcha seems to expect (I think solving it too fast triggers bot fingerprint). More recently when I fall on a recaptcha to solve, I consciently do not rush it and feel have no more to solve more than one anymore. I don't think I have super powers, but as tech guy I do a lot a computing things mechanically.
Just select the audio option. It's faster and easier. Maybe it's because google doesn't care about training on speech to text. I usually write something random for one word and get the other word correct. I can even write "bzzzzt" at the beginning. They don't care because they aren't focused on training on that data.
Now I think of it, it's really a failure that AI didn't use this and went with guessing which square of an image to select.
I always assume that people are lazy and try and click the least amount of squares as possible to get broadly the correct answer. Therefore, if it says motorbikes just click on the body of the bike and leave out rider and tiles with hardly any bike in them.
If it says traffic lights just click on the ones you can see lit and not the posts and ignore them if they are too far in the distance. Seems to work for me.
The other fun thing is the complete lack of localisation for people not from the US. "Select the squares with crosswalks" - with what? Oh, right, the pedestrian crossings... And the fire hydrants look like we've seen in movies, it's like, oh yeah those do exist in real life!
> do you select the guy riding it? do you select the post?
Just select as _you_ would. As _you_ do.
Imperfection and differing judgments are inherent to being human. The CAPTCHA also measures your mouse movement on the X and Y axes and the timing of your clicks.
While running this I looked at hundreds and hundreds of captchas. And I still get rejected on like 20% of them when I do them. I truly don't understand their algorithm lol
Maybe in English. In Spanish (and we’re a bunch, the native Spanish speakers) I guarantee that if you say “América” you’re referring to the continent. The country is “Estados Unidos” (United States) or its abbreviation, EEUU. And its citizens, “estadounidenses”, not “americanos”.
And in French the inhabitants of "les Etats-Unis" are "Etats-uniens". I've taken the habit of referring to them as USAians, which often gets negative reactionsand remains rare - but I find it is the most accurate demonym and I'll keep pushing it.
I look forward to the world inventing demonyms for the citizens of the European Union, because at least it will mean that our emerging national body is getting mindshare !
> I look forward to the world inventing demonyms for the citizens of the European Union, because at least it will mean that our emerging national body is getting mindshare !
The European Union is an emerging country - it is my country. For now, many don't yet understand how common necessity binds us, and some remain under the illusion that they can make it alone against China and the USA, but ever closer union is real and whoever has been on Erasmus student exchange knows we are one people. On my French passport, "Union Européenne" is written above "République Française" - that is the hierarchy. A nation is people who will to live together, and the European Union is that... The rest is a couple treaties and a few decades away !
One thing that strikes me as odd, as someone not from the US, is that it’s kind of assumed that people are renting? I’d expect that lots of people in SV/Bay area would just buy the place, expensive as that might be.
There are a ton of costs even if you own and have paid off. Aside from my $5K/year property taxes, I've spent probably $50K (likely more) in the past year for costs related to a fire. Also some significant costs for deferred maintenance that had to happen. Some routine plowing and lawn/field maintenance that I could do myself but that would take capital costs (and time). So not a typical couple of years but I've spent well over $100K on my house even though it's paid-off. It's far from free once you've written that last check to a bank.
Of course, modern condos will likely be cheaper but now you're paying HOA fees each month.
It might not be easily reachable? Some people put the wire inside the drywall for aesthetic reasons for stuff that you rarely unplug, like a TV. A matress can fall in that category.
Power goes to an external pod that has the water reservoir, pump, heating/cooling elements, etc.
It has to be user accessible to refill water, it needs space for airflow, and has to be next to the bed because the mattress water/data/power lines run to it on a limited length umbilical.
It uses a standard IEC C13/C14 power cord. There's no sane configuration where it would be anything more than trivially easy to unplug the power.
But you'll get more retweets and social media engagement if you just stew yourself in your smart device hell and let everyone else know how its going.
People do that perhaps - but it isn't allowed by any code I'm aware of - at least not by default. wires in walls have strict standards that mattress manufactures would't want to meet.
You lose convenience/functionality though. E.g. it’s convenient for me to turn on the aircon an hour before I get home in the summer.
Edit: I'm not talking on a day to day basis, but when I go on a trip. And I don't have a porch nor I like beer.
Amazing that some people downvote for stating the obvious, which is that you can lose some convenience. There's trade offs when you connect something to the Internet? That's also obvious.
When I get back home in the summer from a short trip away, with a toddler and a million bags it is definitely convenient for me to have a cool home and not a 40+ degrees celsius one.
You can remotely control devices that don’t themselves have any access to the internet via local smart home platforms that are internet accessible, e.g. Apple Home or Home Assistant.
If your schedule is consistent a standard programmable thermostat does the job for pretty cheap.
My Ecobee is convenient but will probably go back to an offline model when it dies or loses support. Once I dialed in my preferred schedule, I rarely touch it except to lock a set temperature when going out of town.
In this niche forum people keep saying “there’s no moat”. But the moat is the brand recognition, if I ask my 70yo mum “have you heard of Gemini/Claude” she’ll reply “the what?”, yet she knows of ChatGPT.
Does Coca Cola have a moat? Some company could raise $1B to create a new cola beverage that beats Coca Cola in all blind tests imaginable yet people will keep buying Coca Cola.
Did people switch search engines or social networks when Google or FB introduced ads?
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