I think defaultism plays a huge role. If your wife's next smartphone or TV or whatever comes with AI made by a different company, I think she won't really care and use that if it's good.

By the way this is a perfectly rational stance. If the supermarket next to me stopped stocking Coca Cola, I would just by Pepsi.

I think that kind of inertia mostly lasts as long as there is no financial incentive to move. A ChatGPT user who is not paying anything to OpenAI is of little benefit to them, and has little incentive to switch. However if OpenAI start trying to make money off those users by adding advertising, or removing the free tier, then things may change. Google can afford to subsidize chat from their other revenue streams, but OpenAI can't.

I think you're right about stickyness up to a point.

Cultural defaults seem unchangeable but then suddenly everyone knows, that's everyone knows, that OpenAI is passé.

OpenAI has a real chance to blow their lead, ending up in a hellish no-man's land by trying to please everyone: Not cool enough for normies, not safe enough for business, not radical enough for techies. Pick a lane or perish.

Not owning their own infrastructure, and being propped up by financial / valuation tricks are more red flags.

Being a first mover doesn't guarantee getting to the golden goose, remember MySpace.

> Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness.

I think you're underestimating how fickle consumers are, and how much their choices are based on fashion and emotion. A couple more of these, and OpenAI will find itself relegated to the kids' table with Grok and Perplexity. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/15/1121900/gpt4o-gr...

Why would you want to move conversations with you? I use multiple different models, I don't care about the history.

My "brain" in terms of projects, is local on my computer. I have a simple set of system rules that I need to copy.

I am not everyone, I understand that. What I try to say: don't overestimate the lock in effect of AI. I doubt there is one.

Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end.

For myself, I use LLMs daily and I would even say a lot on some days and I _did_ pay the 20€/mo subscription for ChatGPT, but with the latest model I cannot justify that anymore.

4o was amazingly good even if it had some parasocial issues with some people, it actually did what I expect an LLM to do. Now the quality of the 5.whatever has gone drastically down. It no longer searches web for things it doesn't know, but instead guesses.

Even worse is the tone it uses; "Let's look at this calmly" and other repeated sentences are just off putting and make the conversation feel like the LLM thinks I am about to kill myself constantly and that is not what I want from my LLM.

I hear the claim that people already have their conversation on ChatGPT and can't move them. I'm curious, what are these discussions like? I've never continued an old discussion, I just start a new one every time I have a question. If the discussion is long, I often start a new chat to get a blank slate. My experience is that the chat history just causes confusion.

So I'm curious to understand: What are the discussions like that people go back to and would lose if they moved to another platform?

Anecdata point: I canceled my ChatGPT pro subscription last year over some shitty thing Altman did at OpenAI and easily moved over to Claude. The only thing I took with me was the system prompt or whatever it's called, I couldn't care less about my conversation history. I'm planning to do the same thing with my Claude subscription if Anthropic kowtows to the Pentagon. These services are not sticky at all IMO.

> but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere.

Except these aren't conversations in the traditional sense. Yes, there's the history of prompts and responses exchanged. But the threads don't build on each other - there's no cross-conversational memory, such as you'd have in a human relationship. Even within a conversation it's mostly stateless, sending the full context history each time as input.

So there's no real data or network effect moat - the moat is all in model quality (which is an extremely competitive race) and harness quality (same). I just don't think there's any real switching cost here.

It would literally take you 5 mins to set up your wife with a competing client for her needs.

Sure it's 'sticky' at least a little, but it's not a moat. A moat is a show stopper like they own you.

Yahoo, altavista, askjeeves, Google

Friendster, MySpace, Facebook

Netscape, ie, chrome

Icq, aim, MSN messenger, a million other chat apps

First mover advantage doesn't last long

Very high chance that the winner in five years is a company that does not yet exist

In theory you can export your data from ChatGPT under Settings > Data Controls. In practice, I tried this recently and the download link was broken. Convenient bug I must say.

I don’t know how much of an anecdote it is, but all the non-tech people with whom I talk about IA only know chatGPT. Competition is either non existent or the same thing. Among those, no one wants to pay the service, they just stop using it when limits are reached. I can’t say which users can turn the market around but chatGPT is indeed burned in the mind of many and because they don’t care about tech and are not interested in tech they won’t search for any other service it seems. Even after many discussions they don’t remember the names of other IA I told them

> The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue.

People used to suggest this about MySpace.

It's way too easy to export your context for this to be real. I moved away from ChatGPT from Gemini months ago and haven't thought of it. Paid.

The moment openai starts charging for their service properly, people will start shopping around.

See power users such as devs with coding assistants that have model selection dropdowns allowing you to switch on a whim. There is zero loyalty or stickiness in the paying user crowd.

I don't really see that stickiness to be honest.

Most people I know with android phones, myself included, just use Gemini which is bundled with the OS and has a dedicated button, has excellent data and integration with maps and such.

When it comes to enterprise, non IT companies (banking, insurance, etc) in Europe seem to be defaulting to Google's offerings, Gemini and NotebookLM in particular.

several of my friends named their chatgpt 'Amanda' or 'George' because they talked about real mental issues with it. I don't see them moving to another platform because that's essentially asking them to leave their 'best friend/therapist'.

> My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else.

Ads might change that. If we know anything, nobody beats Google with ad based monetization. OAI is absolutely correct to be scared.

I definitely think they’ve nailed the personality better than others too. Gemini and grok are always paragraphs and paragraphs of text to sift through for something that with openai is usually digested to much less

> The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue.

> My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else.

Is she paying for it? Because as we have seen repeatedly in the past, paid products whither and die when Microsoft bundles a default replacement.

You need to provide a really good reason why this time its different.

OpenAI is already building complex user models. And I mean, super detailed user models - where you are from, what you do, what are your most vulnerable weaknesses, what you care about the most and everything else. This is information even the world's largest advertising company would struggle to put together across their fragmented eco-system (Gmail, Search, etc), but OpenAI has all this on a silver platter. And that scares me, because, a lot of people use ChatGPT as a therapist. We know this because of their advertising intent which they've explicitly expressed. Advertising requires good user models to work (so advertisers can efficiently target their audience) and it is the only way to prove ROI to the advertisers. "But, OpenAI said they won't do targeted ads..". Remember, Google said "Don't be evil" once upon a time too..

That's ok, we use ChatGPT only for coding. We should be good, right? Umm, no. They already explicitly expressed the intention to take a percentage of your revenue if you shipped something with ChatGPT, so even the tech guys aren't safe.

"As intelligence moves into scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge. Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created. That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path."

"Intelligence will follow the same path."

https://openai.com/index/a-business-that-scales-with-the-val...

So yes, OpenAI has the best chance to win on the consumer side than anyone else. But, that's not necessarily a good thing (and the OpenAI fanboys will hate me for pointing this out).

Google is sticky too, and has a huge moat around that access (android, browsers).

Google hasn't yet pushed hard into dominating the chatGPT use case, but they could EASILY push out chatGPT if they tried. For example, if they instantly turned their search page to the gemini chat, they would instantly have dominated openAI use cases. I'm not saying they would do that, they will probably go for the 'everything app' approach slowly

I think the use cases of chatGPT and google are not differentiated enough to justify 2 winners

> people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere.

I just asked it to build me a searchable indexed downloaded version of all my conversations. One shot, one html page, everything exported (json files).

I’m sure I could ask Claude to import it. I don’t see the moat.

As a counter anecdote, my wife stopped using it because it is quite terrible when you ask it about current events. She almost exclusively uses the Grok app now because it has the "best" internet search and current events results

ChatGPT has a good name. It's weird and awkward but it still rolls off the tongue. And I am saying that as a non native English speaker because the name has been migrated to other languages with the English pronunciation.

In comparison, Claude's name is very bad, it just doesn't sound right and people might mishear me when I say it. I never say "Claude" when talking to other, especially non-technical people, and instead say "ChatGPT" even though I am using Claude exclusively.

Google has another problem - they advertise their models as separate products. There is Gemini and there is Nano Banana, also Nano Banana Pro. But they are all somehow under the same product which is still called Gemini. I understand the distinction but I am sure many non-technical people find it confusing.

At the conversation backlogs worth anything? To me they seem as valuable as Google search history. After maybe 3 days they are worthless.

I disagree. So far I've seen people use "Photoshop" and "Google" as verbs. No one uses "ChatGPT" as a verb. People do use ChatGPT but the brand recognition isn't that strong.

My anecdotes are that Google is winning even on consumer side.

Switching llms is like switching a car. Its a bit annoying in the beginning, it responds slightly different and you need to change you subconscious habits before it feels comfortable. Why everyone always complains about new models. So unless there is a very obvious improvement; most users will prefer to stick to their current llm

Do people care about their old LLM sessions?

I might have sessions I revisit over a few weeks, but nothing longer than that. The conversations feel as ephemeral as the code produced. Some tiny fractions of it might persist long term, but most of it is already forgotten and replaced by lunch time.

by this argument Google will win though. Identical interface with similar quality answers

Exactly. ChatGPT is ubiquitous for the new generation of AI (LLMs) for everyone outside our of bubble. I've spoken to dozens of friends and non-techncial folks about this topic over the last year and not a single one has ever said they use Gemini, Grok or Claude.

OpenAI has by far the strongest brand and user base. It's not even close.

And, when it comes to the product they've been locked in the last few months it seems. The coding models are no longer behind Anthropic's and their general-use chat offering has always been up there at the top.

That being said: I used MySpace daily too... Until I didn't.

Isn't half the appeal of AI that they can write a prompt like move all my text history from OpenAI to Claude and then they do it?

  and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere.

Conversations are not really a valuable service for these companies. The token usage is miniscule.

Agentic development and claw style personal assistants are where the dough is at.

> but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere.

But why would you want to?

You can just leave them there at slowly start new conversation on another platform.

My wife uses Google AI overview - as an extension of search - on a daily basis and then jumps to Gemini

Google has bigger network effect. It can stomp OpenAI

A good solution for memory would help with stickiness. But it's a hard thing to crack.

Completely disagree with this take. I was an early free OpenAI user and switched to Gemini once it got good enough and bundled a bunch of services together to make the paid product free. OpenAI will need distribution to maintain any kind of durable market share. They need to become a bundler of other subs, or else they will just be the next Disney+ or Spotify that needs telecoms (Hah!) to push their paid product onto user's phone bills.

I think that's false. The cost of switching is so low that the best product will win and there's no moat.

I honestly can't see how OpenAI can possibly recoup the hundreds of billions poured into it at this point. I'd say AI assistants are no more sticky than browsers or search engines.

You might be tempted to say that Chrome or Google are sticky. But they're really not. A lot of people aren't old enough to remember the 90s when we had multiple search engines and people did switch. I know this goes against prevailing HN dogma but I'm sorry: Google is simply the best search engine. It doesn't have a magical hold on people. People aren't fooling themselves.

And Chrome? Before smartphones it was simply the better browser. Firefox used to have a much larger market share and Chrome ate their lunch. By being a better browser. Chrome was I think the first browser, or at least the first major browser, to do one process per tab. I still remember Firefox hanging my entire browser when something went wrong. I switched to Chrome in version 2 for that reason.

And now browsers are more sticky because of Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS. Safari really needs to be cross-platform, like seriously so. I know they briefly tried on Windows but they didn't really mean it.

Anyway, back to the point. I believe there's a certain amount of brand inertia but that's it. If Gemini dominates ChatGPT performance and UI/UX, people will switch so fast.

Google, Microsoft and Meta can survive the AI collapse. Apple is irrelevant (at least for now). OpenAI? Doomed IMHO.

And?

The tech landscape is littered with companies they had users who couldn’t monetize through ads. Beside the costs of serving request via LLMs is orders of magnitude greater than a search result.

On top of that, OpenAI is a sharecropper on other companies’ server, they depend on another company’s search engine and unlike Google, they are dependent on Nvidia.

Don’t forget that most browsing is done on the web and Google is the default search engine on almost every phone sold outside of China.

We are in the Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos etc. stage. Plenty of room for a Google still.

I really like your analysis and agree up to a point.

The problem with a moat in the consumer space is it depends on brand and marketing. OpenAI came into this world as a tech novelty, then an amazing tech tool, then a household name.

But… can they compete with massive consumer companies like Apple, Google, etc? In the long run?

There’s no technical reason they can’t. The question is whether they have consumer marketing in their blood. The space doesn’t have a lot of network effects, so it’s not like early Facebook where you had to be on it because everyone was.

Not saying they’ll fail, just saying it would be a significant challenge to be a hybrid frontier model / consumer product company.

The problem with the stickiness is that they will eventually need to start charging, and that friction point will immediately make them come undone. Let’s says they charge $1.99 a month, and Anthropic then step in with a six month free offer, and suddenly everyone has two apps on their phone they’re comfortable with, and it’s a price war over very lightly differentiated products

Having a known brand is not a moat mate. Sorry.

myspace used to be a well known brand. I've worked there.

The problem is that, at least for now, it is dead easy to switch to something else. No need to convert anything, reconfigure anything, it is not like changing gmail to something else or dropping Word for LibreOffice.

Chat window is a chat window.

I can imagine that sooner or later things like OpenClaw (or its alikes) will become more popular and that could be something that will catch users.

The difficulty is that “winning” in this case is setting up a monopoly or duopoly and slowly increasing prices. It’s not clear if OpenAI can get so far ahead of the competition that it becomes a two or one horse race. Right now Anthropic and Google are at least as good. And the open source models keep them all honest pricing wise.

OpenAI will likely keep their billion users, and likely monetise them fairly effectively with ads. Their revenue will be considerable. It’s less clear that OpenAI will “win” and their competitors won’t.