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.
