New figures have claimed ChatGPT's share of the global AI assistant market is under pressure after it dropped below 50% for the first time since its launch in the face of stiff competition from other rivals.
ChatGPT's market share falls to 46.4% as Gemini climbs to 27.7%. Department of War deal saw a spike in ChatGPT uninstalls — Techradar report
Ecosystems matter
This is currently something most observers can agree on. Ecosystems matter, without it, well, you're just a chatbot offering a service your competitors will find a way to bury with the launch of integrated alternatives.
Think about search for instance. The leading narrative when OpenAI released ChatGPT was that Google search was cooked. That would have been true if Google wasn't a very capable tech giant with years of developments that's basically placed them in a position to be an effective monopoly.
If you're one that's so hooked to the space, you probably would have come across arguments suggesting that Google may have been holding back on launching a generative AI app to avoid legal battles over market dominance.
As evident in the report, Google's Gemini is the rising product, but people are too distracted to understand this.
Google has a significant ecosystem leverage. Android, Gmail, Search, YouTube, the list continues.
Integrating and capturing a market that would have earlier tested ChatGPT is rather too easy.
On one hand, users need to download a third-party app that cannot easily integrate across multiple other familiar apps where critical tasks are carried out and in the other hand, you have a solution that will go with you through your devices.
That's a leverage you cannot beat, even if you have a smarter model, in crucial cases, your model is only as smart as the environment it's limited to.
Such smart is useless because it either can't get work down, or requires extra steps.
That's not what users are looking for.
The demand is less for more and having a strong ecosystem makes it most easier to achieve this.
Knowing that AI at the end of the day is an infrastructure level tech, integrations across familiar solutions is the number means to win the market, so in scenarios where alternative providers lack that leverage, their ability to compete will depend stronger on their solutions being so ahead of others that the big players simply cut them a deal.