The branding of Claude is so much stronger than ChatGPT. Even Anthropic is such better branding than OpenAI (especially considering they're not open at all).
My wife knows about Claude because that's what I use and we pay for. She uses it also as a result. And inevitably she will talk about Claude to her friends.
ChatGPT is a word now. People may use Perplexity, or Google, or Grok to ask questions online. And later they tell you "ChatGPT told me this". It's a new "I googled in Yahoo".
ChatGPT is the 5th most visited site (as well as has nearly a billion weekly active users) and none of the competitors are even close. In the consumer space, Gemini is doing well but Claude is not even in the same galaxy. OpenAI is undoubtedly the leader in consumer LLMs and by a large margin. I'm sure there are mixups, but if someone is telling you they're using chatGPT, they almost certainly mean they're using chatGPT.
The consumer market is worthless though. Consumers will never pay, so the only revenue option is ads which barely, if even at all, pay for inference costs.
Ads implemented remotely competently would be worth a lot of money and more than pay for inference. Inference is cheap, especially outside token expensive ordeals like agentic coding.
Maybe. To really make money on ads they would need to embed them directly into the chat I think. Banner ads arent worth enough I think and google is able to make so much off them largely because people are already looking to click a link when they search something. People would just ignore them with genAI.
Maybe Im projecting my distaste for being psychologically manipulated, but I dont think users would continue using a genAI that embeds ads directly into the response when they can just switch to gemini where they only see banners.
I’m pretty sure Gemini would be the leader in consumer LLMs considering it’s on every single search result. Every single google search is also usage of gemini.
Google stuffing things in the search results of existing users does not mean active participation or usage. (Not that I'm saying it's not getting used but it's just a feature of google search, and only a fraction of the kind of queries llms get anyway)
People use LLMs for a lot of things. Different kind of search is only one of them. AI mode is not stopping people from using ChatGPT because it's just a subset of consumer LLM queries.
Perhaps it's just regional, but I've been noticing more and more people saying "chat" to describe ANY ai chat interface including ChatGPT. They might have a Kleenex problem on their hands.
>Few non-programmers have heard of anthropic or claude
They ran a super bowl ad. It's all over the construction industry. Claude is still not quite the Kleenex that ChatGPT is, but there is a pretty good chance lay people have heard of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude by now.
To disagree with the person below/above me that ChatGPT is the word used generically, when someone uses Gemini or Claude or Copilot, they TELL you which one they used, because they are essentially saying "i didnt use ChatGPT by choice."
Gemini is the one most likely to be used without people knowing which one they used.
Def sounds like a bubble to me. In my own bubble, ChatGTP is so well known over the others that people will often slip and refer to other AI services collectively as ChatGTP.
e.g. "I put it in chatgtp and..." when they actual asked Gemini.
It sounds like you have no clue what you're talking about.
The people in real life who say ChatGBT or similar are either so out of the loop the technology doesn't even matter to them, or simply are just stupid.
There is no way a person who can't get "GPT" right is even worth listening to.
My sister, who isn't in tech and would be called a "normie" by people more online than myself, told me she switched to Claude a few months ago because of Anthropic's fight with the pentagon. IMO the unbubbled public certainly knows about Anthropic/Claude, especially given their Super Bowl ad and their stance on standing up to the pentagon/Trump admin.
If "normie" means a noncorporate knowledge worker who uses the free version, yes.
For enterprise, Anthropic is crushing it. In the manufacturing sector I anecdotally hear a 2:1 ratio of Claude to ChatGPT for teams who are settling on a platform.
At my company the grassroots advocacy from devs has certainly been for Claude Code.
Unfortunately even though we have a degree or two of seperation from most federal contracts the punitive DoD blacklisting had enough of a chilling effect on our legal team to make them drag their feet on approving any contract involving Anthropic.
So I pitched OpenAI Business with Codex so we could drop our Github Copilot Business subscription before the billing change takes effect June 1st which was approved without pushback.
I felt some responsibility for finding an immediate solution to dump Copilot since I was the one who recommended adopting Copilot in the first place, ugh... Our prices would have quadrupled based on the single month Microsoft in their beneficence allowed previewing with their tool to simulate what the post-rug pull pricing would have looked like.
Codex becoming more or less a 1:1 replacement for CC made that a no brainer given our options and the exploitative value proposition of Copilot under the new pricing model (which Microsoft evidently hoped companies like us would just accept despite being a third tier option in the dev space these days).
I imagine there are ways for existing investors to achieve liquidity while still raising venture funding. But an IPO is "the" liquidity event and I imagine there will be pressure from investors for that.
I also imagine that venture funding rounds have a lower ceiling than the public markets - but at these rounds I'm not so sure!
Truth is the wrong word for a future outcome. But…
Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?
It’s not the only possible truth. And definitely not the one I’m rooting for personally. That’s what you are hearing from the audience of graduates who are probably quite fearful of their future and also prefer another possible truth.
Yes, and potentially extracts the wealth at the cost of the new grad’s job prospects.
Can you imagine a few decades earlier some former corporate executive giving a commencement speech at a US college extolling the virtues of offshoring, and how it will make his mega corp a lot of money?!
The college graduation version of the company owner speaking to an employee:
“You see that Ferrari out there on the parking lot? If you work really, really hard this year and meet all of your targets, then next year I’ll be able to afford another one.”
> Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?
There are no wealth extraction capabilities yet. It's a money pit. They're certainly hoping it'll surpass some breakpoint and become profitable by brute-forcing compute power, but that's very optimistic. The propaganda Schmidt is pushing envisions that future in hopes of raising current stock prices so they can afford the brute-forcing that's very unlikely to succeed.
My prediction is that we'll keep the tools we've acquired, probably refined a bit, but the LLM path is eventually a dead-end. After this, if they still try to monetize, remote models will be extremely expensive.
> 1) Google doesn't get paid for the SEO, so even is crime is involved, Google isn't directly responsible.
Google doesn't get paid directly for the SEO but they definitely benefit monetarily. Do a recipe search and ask yourself if these are the results the user would like to see. Google benefits by not penalizing sites which litter themselves with ads. It's not that indirect.
I think what was left out of the blog post was "helpful to the advertiser".
The meta point is that advertising has become so ingrained into society it really is difficult to differentiate if a need or desire originated intrinsic or externally. It's really great for companies selling stuff.
I am on the board of a non profit and Claude has enabled workflows that just would never have happened. In 1 week I've done the following for them:
1. Automated ingestion of hand-written tuition scholarship applications into Google Sheets. Near flawless OCR to structured spreadsheet ingestion and image extraction.
2. Revamped the website completely from a simple static website to a dynamic one which accepts donations (started with Claude Design, handed off to Claude Code). Old: https://csmforchrist.com --- New: https://stage.csmforchrist.com
3. Included sponsorship applicant pages (from #1) to let supporters read profiles and choose who to support through the website (this used to be a fully phone/email process before)
As an aside, it feels great to use AI for something that improves people's lives today.
I have tried making that switch many times and lasted for a few months and then one day I find I've been back at the CLI for a week without noticing.
I love CLI tools that effectively give me the things an IDE would offer such as astgrep for refactoring for example. zoekt with a browser does pretty good indexed searches. fzf can be used to build up almost any useful way of selecting things that you can imagine. So the CLI becomes my IDE.
IDEs made the mistake of locking the user into desktop-traditional keybinding paradigm instead of using a more flexible one which would allow for implementation of both vim and desktop paradigms.
(don’t respond with “well they have vim mode plugins”. no they don’t. they’re hacky and unreliable)
My usual saying is that if all you wanted from vim was a few keybindings, you weren’t really using vim’s capabilities to any extent that matters anyway.
My non technical wife knows both ChatGPT and Anthropic (admittedly, because of me) but doesn’t know Gemini. This is amazing to me.
Surely she has seen Gemini in Google search but even her use of that is plummeting.
Google has so much revenue that they’ll be around for a long time. But I feel they are fumbling the opportunity with AI. Even in corporate, where we have Gemini. The conversation is fully around Claude. No one talks about Gemini.
Reports of the death of Google Search have been greatly exaggerated.
If you believe all the reports on HN about everyone's non-technical wives and grandmas, you'd have a hard time explaining the all-time highs in global usage and revenue from Google Search.
I agree with you that Claude 4.7 Opus is better than Gemini 3.1 Pro, but it's also a lot more expensive.
For my applications, I can't find better price-performance than Gemini 3.0 Flash. And it hasn't even been upgraded to 3.1 yet.
I suspect Google's target is price-performance and not just raw performance, which is how they can serve LLM responses at Google Search scale and still set an all-time record for quarterly earnings of any public company ever.
Frontier model capabilities leapfrog each other every few months, and Google I/O is in ten days, so I expect the leaderboard will change again soon.
Unfortunately, I think Google is in the process of killing the golden goose. I visit so few unrecognized websites now and primarily rely on “AI mode” to answer my specific question rather than sift through a handful of possibly accurate pages. How long can that go on before those sites just no longer exist and the source of that knowledge or new knowledge evaporates. Doesn’t seem like that model is sustainable long term.
Honestly, I think the SEO virus killed that golden goose long before the first AI chat bot. If we still had good search taking us to sane websites, ChatGPT might well have never been a thing. I was posting (including on HN) about the vulnerability of Google's search business years before AI chat. It just happens to be the thing that filled the gap when usable search disappeared.
OpenAI and Anthropic have no moat. DeepSeek is a drop-in replacement that is really close in performance for 7.5-20% of the cost. That cost will continue to get pushed down by the Chinese. And bizarrely enough their models are more secure to use because they're open source open weights.
OpenAI and Anthropic are going to get crushed long-term, and their investors are going to take a horrendous haircut.
On the other hand, Google and Microsoft already have the users (and lock-in). They just need to funnel them into Gemini and CoPilot.
DeepSeek r1 affected markets because for a little while people bought this, but it's not true for so many reasons. Sending data to China is out of the question for every American Enterprise. OAI and Anthropic have rich product suites and API harnesses that make DS far from a "drop in replacement." They have better models, generous usage limits, domination of the zeitgeist, integrations with Slack and all the Enterprise SaaS platforms, and magnitudes more GPU capacity than DS. What you say simply isn't true.
- Right, R1 affected markets because the market originally believed your theory, but it doesn't any more, which is why V4 didn't move markets at all.
- Sure, you can use US infra providers. Together.ai is a good US provider but then it's 15X more expensive than DeepSeek's Chinese-subsidized pricing. It's really not that attractive at that price point. Anthropic and OpenAI are focused on larger models, but Grok 4.3[1] is smarter and significantly faster + cheaper than DS4[2] and by a wide margin.
- DeepSeek has a Claude-compatible messages API, but that's trivial. Anthropic has a massive API platform with things like Sessions, Files, and Agents[3]. None of those are available on DeepSeek.
- V4 will definitely move markets, especially as Claude and OpenAI keep jacking up the prices more and more. But inertia exists. Give it time.
- Most US infra providers are ~5x more expensive than Chinese infra, not 15x. But yes you are right. It does erode the cost advantage significantly. Big asterisk is that V4 seems to have solid cache hit percentage, often in the high 90s.
- Grok (and Llama) always underperform relative to their benchmark and ranking results. Don't ask my why, but it's a persistent pattern me and colleagues have noticed. I'll give them another try though, more competition is better.
- DeepSeek themselves have specifically said they prefer developing high performance models that you plug into other tooling, including Claude's. Regardless, I think it's unrealistic to expect DeepSeek to offer 1:1 suite compatibility with Claude or OpenAI. You wouldn't expect that from OpenAI <> Claude either.
I think the real crux of the moat is model intelligence. I'd bet that most of the money being spent on inference is on the top few models (today Opus-4.7 and GPT-5.5) from people and companies that benefit from using the best models.
Truly the main moat that OAI/Anthropic have is being 6 months months ahead of the competition in performance, which might be indefinite if the competition is just distilling their models (China) or takes many months between releases (Google).
Once you look passed the frontier of performance, it's just a race to the bottom on inference costs because there's at least 5 companies with equivalent open models at that level.
I wish DeepSeek were a drop-in replacement, but it's not. It performs amazingly well but it's not as autonomous and needs a lot more nudges compared to Opus4.6/7 or GPT 5.5. It's good enough for a lot of things (text extraction, sentiment analysis, classifying things) but not on the same level for code gen.
My wife knows about Claude because that's what I use and we pay for. She uses it also as a result. And inevitably she will talk about Claude to her friends.
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