Yeah. People have very strange ideas about competition and choice and moat. If all you needed to unseat the entrenched was a competitor then Bing would be going toe to toe with Google, and Edge with Chrome. They have a billion+ devices they can stick those options as defaults and still nothing. There are many examples.
People are naturally sticky. If they're satisfied with a product, they'll stick around unless something comes along that is so much better it gets people talking. Open AI's 1B+ customers won't give a shit about Chinese models. Enterprise customers won't move to Chinese models, especially just to save money. They are a non issue, especially if the M.O is just going to be playing catch-up.
You're wrong. Are you sticky about your search engine? Now try having your search engine charge you $100 a month and tell me you'd stick with google search. Open AI's 1B+ customers will give quite the shit about cost if chatgpt stops being free.
They're sticky, but not for everything. There are common goods where the market has commoditized greatly because customers are conscious of quality and not provenance. Something like apples.
Most people buy their apples from the same grocery store every week. They're not shopping around every month to find who has the cheapest apples or 'best' apples. They go where they're accustomed to going, and as long as price and quality are satisfactory, they have little reason to change. Walmart, price-sensitive as they are, have relationships with fruit suppliers they've maintained for well on a decade. Even in commoditized markets, people are sticky.
Google, the titan mega-corp with more money than they know what to do with and a billion+ android devices to ship gemini on and it's made no dent for ChatGPT's consumer growth and adoption. Yet some plucky open source chinese models will?. It takes more than that.
look at mr. richie rich here, bragging that he doesn't have to shop around to find the cheap apples
I'm not rich and you don't have to be rich.
The big big difference is that you dont pay directly for google. Paying per token is more akin to going grocery shopping.
Why wouldn't they give a shit about Chinese models? TikTok isn't even THAT much better than Instagram.
Yes it is. Tiktok's content and content recommendation algorithms are much better than Instagram. Users spend more time on Tiktok than they do Instagram and it's not close. Tiktok's engagement rates are several times better than Instagram. Reels did nothing to dent it (yet another example in the book). Again, nobody will care about Chinese models if they're just more of the same. They can take a piece of the pie, but this idea that they'll spell doom for the frontier labs is nonsense.
[dead]