All of Sam’s shenanigans go back to that one popular post on here many months ago about how AI has no moat. LLMs are a commodity, Chinese companies are just releasing them for free. Sam has gone all in on OpenAI and needs to secure his company, he knows it could be another decade until they discover an innovation on par with tranformers and there’s absolutely no way they can go from burning tens of billions of dollars a year to profitable by selling a rapidly commoditized technology.
ChatGPT has literally no brand moat. Nobody recognizes, or even cares about, the brand. They care about the interface - chat.
If you just take those chinese models and slap them on some decent looking website, nobody will know the difference. People take brand recognition far too seriously.
If Linux was actually indistinguishable from Windows, you bet your ass nobody in their right mind would install Windows. But they're actually different things.
> LLMs are a commodity but ChatGpt is a brand, for most people AI means ChatGpt. They are not going to use Chinese models.
This is still an unknown.
> Linux is free and yet people use Windows.
The moat isn't even 1% of the one that Windows has - and even Windows has been losing ground on the consumer side. While slow, the rate acceleration is definitely there. Compare Oct 2020-Oct 2025 vs the preceding 5-year period.
I don’t buy this argument about brand, in tech history has showed customers will switch overnight if a better option appears and there is no network effects or ecosystem lockin. BlackBerry had a brand too.
