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.