Apple is not the right analogy. OpenAI has first mover advantage and they have a widely recognized brand name — ChatGPT — and that’s kind of it. Anyone (with very deep pockets) can buy Nvidia chips and go to town if they have a better or equivalent idea. There was a brief time (long before I was born) when “Univac” was synonymous with “computer.”

> I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons."

Well Trump is interested in tariffing movies and South Korea took DeepSeek off mobile app stores, so they certainly may try. But for high-end tasks, DeepSeek R1 671B is available for download, so any company with a VPN to download it and the necessary GPUs or cloud credits can run it. And for consumers, DeepSeek V3's distilled models are available for download, so anyone with a (~4 year old or newer) Mac or gaming PC can run them.

If the only thing keeping these companies valuations so high is banning the competition, that's not a good sign for their long-term value. If you have to ban the competition, you can't be feeling good about what you're making.

For what it's worth, I think GPT o3 and o1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7 Sonnet are good enough to compete. DeepSeek R1 is often the best option (due to cost) for tasks that it can handle, but there are times where one of the other models can achieve a task that it can't.

But if the US is looking to ban Chinese models, then that could suggest that maybe these models aren't good enough to raise the funding required for newer, significantly better (and more expensive) models. That, or they just want to stop as much money as possible from going to China. Banning the competition actually makes the problem worse though, as now these domestic companies have fewer competitors. But I somewhat doubt there's any coherent strategy as to what they ban, tariff, etc.

Big difference - Apple makes billions from smartphones, getting most of the industry's profits, which makes it hard to compete with.

OpenAI loses billions and is at the mercy of getting new investors to fund the losses. It has many plausible competitors.

> ban all non-US LLM providers

What do you consider an "LLM provider"? Is it a website where you interact with a language model by uploading text or images? That definition might become too broad too quickly. Hard to ban.

IE once captured all of the value in browserland, with even much higher mindshare and market dominance than OpenAI has ever had. Comparing with Apple (= physical products) is Apples to oranges (heh).

Their relationship with MS breaking down is a bad omen. I'm already seeing non-tech users who use "Copilot" because their spouse uses it at work. Barely knowing it's rebadged GPT. You think they'll switch when MS replaces the backend with e.g. Anthropic? No chance.

MS, Google and Apple and Meta have gigantic levers to pull and get the whole world to abandon OpenAI. They've barely been pulling them, but it's a matter of time. People didn't use Siri and Bixby because they were crap. Once everyone's Android has a Gemini button that's just as good as GPT (which it already is (it's better) for anything besides image generation), people are going to start pressing them. And good luck to OpenAI fighting that.

Switching between Apple and Google/Android ecosystems is expensive and painful.

Switching from ChatGPT to the many competitors is neither expensive nor painful.

Companies that are contractors with the US government already aren’t allowed to use Deepseek even if its an airgapped R1 model is running on our own hardware. Legal told us we can’t run any distills of it or anything. I think this is very dumb.