It takes me all of 2 keypresses to switch models. I don't know of a less sticky product

Idk why Jev was even hyped in the first place. Mostly by social media people who are the type to write inspirational LinkedIn articles, Medium posts and make longwinded Youtube videos about subjects they don't know or care to know much about.

It's always been obvious that small models with a specific purpose will outplay the larger more general models. It becomes a question of "do I want to be able to toss _anything_ at this frontier model, have it handle it all but pay the price" or "do I want to toss _specific things_ at this micro model, have it handle it but not be flexible".

It's the same with agentic RAG/search, things are moving towards much smaller search-specific models rather than tossing RAG chunks at a large frontier LLM. It's like how I can ask a multimodal frontier model to identify bounding boxes for objects in an image...but if I want to do that faster/cheaper/at 60fps then I should be using yolo or similar.

> If I were OpenAI or Anthropic I’d be racing to make their products as sticky as possible bc ppl will flock to what’s cheapest otherwise.

Hopefully people will flock to whatever product is making its mission to be commodity and the easiest to replace. Really don't want another free ingress, 100$/TB egress Cloud situation.

Is making their product sticky perhaps what all the talk of supply chain security is really motivated by?

Guys please calling it system one is just wrong

I’m getting more convinced models are like the internet in the 90s

While the internet will live on, many of the companies that were initially leaders in it will not.

I’d bet by 2039 either Anthropic or OpenAI will have been bought by SpaceX. One will be the Sun Microsystems of this era.

If somebody from OpenAI or Anthropic is reading this, one way to make the products stickier would certainly be to not make the desktop apps a complete shitshow.

Maybe they could for example point their amazing models to their GitHub issues, and use their power to actually fix the bugs and myriad of papercuts before solving cancer and world war/peace/whathever the stockholders believe they want.

>nail in the coffin

> is .. all people want.

Try making more measured statements, you exaggerate your point and end up being wrong. Of course this new barely used product feature is not all people want. Of course this minor product feature is not the nail in the coffin of whatever argument, they are just responding fast to a smaller competitor by providing that feature themselves, something that happens thousands of times in business, did Instagram prove it was a commodity when it implemented reels by copying tik tok? Did Uber prove it was a commodity when it started offering food delivery? Doesn't make much sense.

It’s interesting that both companies have fully embraced agentic development with unlimited token budgets and yet still can’t expand beyond the original core products

All of those companies that naive HNers used to say they could code in a weekend literally can be coded in a weekend now, so why haven’t they?

If enterprise is the goal they’re really at the whims of the old school software companies because they own no data of their own. Imagine Google decides to push Gemini one day and now ChatGPT can’t write docs anymore.

> If I were OpenAI or Anthropic I’d be racing to make their products as sticky as possible bc ppl will flock to what’s cheapest otherwise.

My approach would be per-user (or per-project) "memory".

I don't mean a tack-on like a RAG / document store with "notes" added to it in the background, but an actual medium- and long-term memory. Something like an extension of the KV cache stored in High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), or a subset of the weights trained "online", similar to LoRA.

This would not be transferable to any other base model, so would be excellent "lock in".

The downside is that the memories likely wouldn't be transferable to new models either, but I can imagine solutions to that too. I.e.: Train an MLP to "translate" from the old memory weight space to the new one.

But OpenAI and Ant can be in more than just the commodity part of the business. They can both make frontier models and sticky products on top of those that have network or other effects that make competition tough.

> If I were OpenAI or Anthropic I’d be racing to make their products as sticky as possible bc ppl will flock to what’s cheapest otherwise.

That's what I have been saying: OpenAI or Anthropic's moat will not be the models, but how they integrated into enterprise clients and make it super hard for them to switch to a different provider. Kind of like Microsoft Office does it. Or Slack. Or Google Work. None of these products are better in any sense, they just cater to the needs of big enterprise clients in another way (customer relationship, sales, maybe compliance) and make it hard to switch

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