Tell me who you think your customers might be? Or ask ChatGPT what's a good watering hole for them, it will definitely come up with some reasonable guesses.
How about this counter offer? I give you 50% of the revenue for any sale you make for https://seaquel.app. If you tell me we need a lifetime offer, consider it done.
From the title and the beginning, I was sure this was going to be about the imminent brand age in software with the commoditization of the software engineering discipline brought on by AI.
I.e. in the early days (2023-2025, lol), companies were mostly differentiated by the quality of their LLM, i.e. GPT-3.5 was leagues ahead of anyone else, so was for serious work the only game in town. Until recently it was basically only the US based companies (OpenAI/Anthropic) with models worth using.
Now, Anthropic and OpenAI are neck-and-neck, and Chinese models are catching up fast, and the models are becoming commodities, and as long as they reach some threshold of quality/capability, it doesn't really matter to most customers.
So now we might be reaching the branding stage of LLMs. I.e. do you go for Anthropic, who are branding themselves as the responsible ones, or OpenAI, who are branding themselves as... the innovators? Not sure what they are going for these days.
If all models are roughly equally capable, all that's left is branding.
At least those are the thoughts it provoked in me. If that's what Paul Graham meant or not I have no idea.
I think you’re right about the impetus for the piece. I’ll say that branding is for things consumed in public, I expect vendor lock in before branding. But as you know this site is awash in speculation about how the lack of differentiation will play out
Don't worry even if your heirs have the password, it's extremely likely that Google will find the login attempts "suspicious" and try to verify your identity by sending SMS codes to a phone number you last had in 2005, despite your best attempts to prevent it.
Yeah, I was waiting for an actual 9 headed hydra of crap, featuring:
* a whole page of sponsored-yet-indistinguishable-from-organic results
* a confidently incorrect AI snippet
* the below-the-fold top organic results being all content spam
* the first actually relevant result from a reputable source being then paywalled with a "you ran out of stories for this month" overlay on a website I have never browsed in a year
* the 2nd actually relevant result prompting a "login with google" overlay with prefilled identity that gets clicked by accident 20% of the time
* all of the above in a Chrome browser, requiring a quadruple opt-out before allowing you to use GMail without also starting a browser-wide session to keep track of your every keystroke
* or alternatively an app based mobile interface where links can't be copied and pasted to prevent loss of tracking
* something with AMP
This is not even close to everything that is wrong, if anything it should be called "barely the tip of the iceberg of everything that is wrong".
In their defense it does feature a bunch of other invisible things (lack of cached results, lack of direct links you can obtain with a right click, etc)
First step is guessing who your customers might be.
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