Microsoft really put this notion under a spotlight with how they deal with LLMs in VSCode Copilot. The LLMs are just a drop-down menu that you can switch between at any moment, on a whim. They all plug into the same toolchains and are essentially generic commodities. They have slightly different prices for usage but that's about it, their outputs aren't wildly different. On topic for this post: it's very telling that Grok models aren't available in Copilot and nobody cares.
I think this arrangement is probably the future of LLM usage, and it does not bode well for everyone betting the farm that their model will be special.
Search engine are as well. At least in the eu they literally are the first thing a browser asks you when you launch it for the first time.
On a dropdown you have 2 clicks to do to change. For search engine you are prompted to using Google is one click; using something else costs the same click.
Google is still managing an outrageous domination.
Being percieved as the best is still a huge headstart. 99% of the population is not using “last weeks llm that topped AIME and ARC-AGI“. They are using “ChatGPT” with the default model selected.
People are going to switch when “their tech friend tells them to switch”. The same way they switched from internet explorer to chrome.
Once you reach that position you can afford being “not the best but good enough” for a long time.
xAI needs to convince investors that: OpenAI is struggling so there is an opening to take the crown and be popular enough to get people to switch. They have twitter to help make that happen.
And they need to convince that no one else is going so much better than they are anytime soon; they just need to be good enough
> They are using “ChatGPT” with the default model selected.
Funny, because the OpenAI models are not the first or even second choice for anyone I know who uses Copilot for coding agents. Anthropic and Google are absolutely stomping them in this space.
Search engines are pretty different from LLMs, in any case: they all have different UX right in your face, different functionality, etc. The LLMs simply generate text, that's all they do, and the differences are far more subtle.
Your sample are tech people using Copilot, which is very small population sample. Hundreds of millions of casual users around the world default to ChatGPT, and for example in my country, it's basically household name at this point. They haven't even heard about Claude or Gemini. For Google, it looks like like Google+ vs Facebook situation all over again.
It's the same with DuckDuckGo's search and Cursor, the models are interchangeable and there's no "walled garden", none of them can assert any control or restrictions on others, it's a strict meritocracy.
I think this arrangement is probably the future of LLM usage, and it does not bode well for everyone betting the farm that their model will be special.