Chatgpt is a proprietary eponym[1], like kleenex, or Google for search. That's a relatively strong attractor based on their first mover status. I nevertheless use tissues, and search engines like brave search, sometimes duckduckgo, and claude or openrouter for my LLM models.

I think there are too many good alternatives for Chatgpt to turn the screws too hard on their users, but we'll see where it settles out. As usual, the most vulnerable will be squeezed the hardest (the ignorant and tech feeble). Hopefully competition and some oversight will keep the wolves at bay.

The finance people were chatting about the OpenAI's ad play a while back, glad to see it finally dawning on this crowd.

1. Not all jurisdictions have granted OpenAI the Chatgpt trademark.

Weirdly, I think Perplexity is getting a lot of mainstream name recognition because of podcasts. All the big slop pods like Rogan, Theo Von, etc are sponsored by Perplexity and the hosts constantly name check it by asking to “look stuff up on Perplexity”. Honestly pretty smart marketing all things considered.

Claude? I’d be extremely surprised.

Gemini? As gemini.google.com or as the thoroughly mediocre “AI summaries” on top of Google Search results?