All costs are not equal. There is a classic pattern of dogfights for winner-take-most product categories where the long term winner does the best job of acquiring customers at the expense of things like "engineering to reduce costs". I have no idea how the AI space is going to shake out, but if I had to pick between OpenAI's mindshare in the broadest possible cohort of users vs. best/most efficient model, I'd pick the customers.
Obviously, lots of nerds on HN have preferences for Gemini and Claude, and having used all three I completely get why that is. But we should remember we're not representative of the whole addressable market. There were probably nerds on like ancient dial-up bulletin boards explaining why Betamax was going to win, too.
Unlike Uber or whatsapp, there's no network effect. Don't think this is a winner takes all market, there was an article where we had this discussion earlier. Players who get a small market share are immediately profitable proportional to the market share (given a minimum size is exceeded.)
We don't even know yet if the model is the product though, and if OpenAI is the company that will make the AI product/model, (chat that keeps expanding into other functionalities and capabilities) or will it be 10,000 companies using the OpenAI models. (well, it's probably both, but in what proportion of revenue)
Right, but it might not even matter if all the competitors are in the ballpark of the final product/market fit and OpenAI holds a commanding lead in customer acquisition.
Again: I don't know. I've got no predictions. I'm just saying that the logic where OpenAI is outcompeted on models themselves and thus automatically lose does not hold automatically.