alt Hacker News> More importantly, as sustainable long-term businesses, model-only providers are particularly at risk. Knowledge Atlas, Moonshot Labs, and Anthropic face defensibility challenges versus OpenAI, Alibaba, SpaceX, Meta, and Google.
Hm. How is OpenAI not a “model-only” provider just like Anthropic? Seems like they are vulnerable in the same way.
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The article does address what they see as the difference ("its investments in product, consumer experience, site publishing, voice, and hardware are all directions that have clearer moats")
That said I think it is pretty easy to make a case that these would-be differentiators are either currently underwhelming or completely unproven (as in the case of hardware).
They are trying to diversify into consumer hardware and also are further along in owning data centers. The consumer hardware product, assuming it launches and does decently well, puts them in a very unique position relative to pretty much every other frontier lab. It's more speculative, but I'd argue it can change things quite a bit for them if it works out.
They've been doing hardware stuff as well. Both "consumer facing" bs like wearables / portables, but also more importantly chips for inference.
Having a good model is one thing, being able to serve that model at good speeds and match demand is another. See Anthropic ~6months ago. Or Moonshot, they've already suspended subscriptions to their coding plans, because they can't meet demand.
ChatGPT is synonymous with non technical/work related LLMs. They're amassing a ton of user history. That history improves the product for the user because it has more context into the person. They can feed it back into model improvements and for advertising.
You can see a future where a user types in "plan a vacation for me" and ChatGPT coordinates everything from there. Those sorts of users aren't going to switch because model X is 10% cheaper or better.