Ads are inevitable in AI, and that's okay
OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini are in the lead for the AI race. Anything they produce also seems to get copied (and made open source) by Bytedance, Alibaba and Deepseek, not to mention Llama and Mistral. While the leaders have carved out niches (OpenAI is a consumer company with the most popular website, Claude is the developer’s darling and wins the CLI coding assistant), the models themselves are becoming more interchangeable amongst them.
Well, not quite interchangeable yet. Consumer preferences matter. People prefer using one vs the other, but these are nuanced points. Most people are using the default LLMs available to them. If someone weren’t steeped in the LLM world and watching every move, the model-selection is confusing and the difference between the models sound like so much gobbledegook.
One solution is to go deeper and create product variations that others don’t, such that people are attracted to your offering. OpenAI is trying with Operator and Codex, though I’m unclear if that’s a net draw, rather than a cross sell for usage.
