MySpace and Friendster both claimed ~115M peak users.
> It's literally orders of magnitude.
Sure, and the speed at which ChatGPT went from zero to a billion is precisely why they need a moat... because otherwise the next one can do it to them.
Your argument is like a railroad company in 1905 scoffing at the idea that airliners will be a thing.
Peek users is not the amount of users they had when Facebook started.
Facebook probably would've never became a thing if MySpace already had ~115M users when it started.
MySpace had ~1M.
That's why DeepSeek (or anyone else) is going to have an incredibly difficult time convincing ~1B to switch from ChatGPT to their tool instead.
Can it happen? For sure.
Will it happen? Less likely.
If anyone unseats ChatGPT - it's much more likely to be a usual suspect like Google, Apple, or Microsoft - then some obscure company no one has ever heard of.
MySpace and Friendster both spent significant time as the #1 social sites. Facebook unseated them rapidly. The same is possible for OpenAI.