As with much informed speculation about how the economics of AI are developing, here’s two takes with differing opinions.
One from Mathew Berman respected AI and software development soothsayer and influencer. The other from Benedict Evans whose tech industry newsletter we often quote from at PSA, and who has been consulting on tech development for years, and has covered the AI revolution as well.
Evans thinks Open AI’s huge user base isn’t a sustainable advantage over other LLM services, and thinks those users can easily move to other vendors, as people do with commodities.
That LLMs are commodities is supported by Apple’s arrangement with Google to use Gemini as Siri support, which Apple will not be acknowledging with a Google or Gemini branding, according to Apple prognosticators.
IOW, Gemini will just be a white label commodity LLM underlying the proprietary higher level capabilities that Apple with include in their “Apple Intelligence” system and application software.
Berman instead notes “user capture” from a developed AI relationship over time, which includes memory and previous chats that enable higher quality AI responses to queries.
Berman says that people in that sort of environment/ ecosystem DON”T want to move to a different vendor.
It does seem currently that changing LLM services is NOT something that can be easily done without losing that previous established and aggregated connection.
Berman thinks OpenAI is doing.a loss leader with users and new users, to “lock them in” before their competitors can equal OpenAI’s present distribution advantage of users signed up.
From Evan’s Newsletter:
Loading...
Reload document 
Open in new tab
From Berman’s YouTube transcript
Berman ‘s YouTube Three Major announcement from OpenAI
Full transcript of that YouTube below in slightly edited for clarity version.