I wonder if Unity (the game engine) actually has a sneaky potential here. It’s cross platform, fast, and maybe just maybe less bloated than carrying around an entire browser like Electron?
Not sure about Unity, bot Godot is already used to build tools, like Pixelorama (pixel art graphics editor, a bit akin to Asesprite), RPG In A Box (game engine targeted for RPG games), Bitmapflow (tool to generate in-between animation frames), and probably more I don't know about.
Well, if I remember correctly, the Godot editor is written in Godot.
If Unity were to ship platform native replacement for WPF equivalent (hell or even winforms) it would become a really enticing app development platform.
Aren't these pretty much the most trivial UI apps possible? E.g. compared to other native apps like Photoshop, Blender, Visual Studio or Office, CRUD is mostly just about banging together custom UI frontend for a database.
Unity's editor is implemented in its own (old) UI system, same with Godot, so in both engines it's possible to create 'traditional' non-game UI applications.
Unity's 2D UI stuff is very poorly designed, with lots of edge cases where auto-calculated fields can hit a divide-by-zero issue and then become unrecoverable because the value is now NaN which can't be auto-calculated back to a number.
Speaking from personal experience, Godot has the sneakiest potential. It has all the UI components and flexible layout containers you could ask for, a signaling system that lets you put the methods from less relevant components in the scripts for more relevant ones (making for a more compact project), and you can also manually compile slim template builds for cleaner distribution. There's a future there.
I was a VR developer from about 2014 to 2020 after many years in traditional video games.
The really sad thing about how VR evolved is that sim sickness was not taken seriously as a barrier for mass adoption. Too many devs and players cast it aside as a "them" problem. "They" couldn't handle it. "They" didn't have VR legs.
The bottom line is that most things that became popular in VR were violating the rules which prevented sim sickness. This was a self-fulfilling prophecy that led the VR world into a corner.
I'm hopeful that Valve will be better stewards of VR in the long run, once Meta shuts down its hardware division, which you know is coming in the next couple years.
The problem is that freer movement is more immersive and it’s that free movement that really increases the immersion, and immersion is the product that VR is selling over monitors. I do agree it’s a market limiting problem, but there’s only so many beat sabers and shooting galleries that can lock you in place and still deliver that.
It would appear that the Metaverse (as envisioned by Meta) was nothing more than a way to "grow" when there was no other reasonable path. It was a solution to this problem and this problem alone. Nobody wanted it.
Then AI comes along and offers real growth opportunity. But of course, Meta fumbled that one out of the gate because they are more interested in winning than in actually offering anything of value. So they figured they could sabotage the whole thing by open sourcing Llama. Then they got steamrolled by everyone actually creating value for people instead of following their tried and true parasite model.
No tech company in this era has been more destructive to society than Meta. Their utter lack of principles has led them down this path. Ironically the most value they have generated is to their investors and especially their employees who are all wealthy now, funded with advertising dollars from across the economy.
By giving away a viable product to steal the revenue stream from OpenAI in hopes they'd die on the vine. To draw developer attention towards them and take ownership of a thriving ecosystem like a honeypot so they could bait and switch them towards some kind of perverse ad-driven nightmare once they were dependent on them. You know, the standard Zuck playbook.
I've often thought that in the USA we could use a type of crime that's called "Betrayal of the Public Trust". It is reserved specifically for public servants and elected officials. The idea is that if you choose to do that job, it is contingent on the public's trust. If you betray that trust it is important to recognize that specifically. This should include harsher sentencing.
This should be a deterrent to those who would pursue power for its opportunities in unethical behavior. It would also be a way for society to recognize the seriousness of this breach.
Why would those who benefit from this crime ever outlaw it for themselves and their buddies? It makes no sense at all. Laws are only ever passed for a reason.
I run a small game studio. I use Cursor to write features that I don’t want to hand code, but wouldn’t ask a teammate to do. Usually that is because describing the idea to a person would take about as much effort and the result would take longer.
These are usually internal tools, workflow improvements, and one off features. Anything really central to the game’s code gets human coded.
I think the further you are from the idea part, the less fun AI coding will be for you. Because now you need to not just translate some spec to code, you have to translate it to a prompt, which ups the chances of playing the telephone game. At least when you write the code yourself you are getting real with it and facing all the ambiguities as a matter of course. If you just pass it to an LLM you never personally encounter the conflicts, and it might make assumptions you would not… but you don’t even realize it because they are assumptions!
If they ever do anything again it will be a miracle. Meta is where smart people go to trade in their ambition and morals for stock grants and golden handcuffs.
Trading away your morals is definitely bad in a philosophical sense. Does selling your soul to the devil have a happy ending in any of the fairy tales?
>Meta is where smart people go to trade in their ambition and morals for stock grants and golden handcuffs.
Only Meta? Why not most of SV that's driven by ad revenue and data collection? Which big-tech company that pays crazy money is actually making the world a better place?
Someone please explain how OpenAI is not Netscape 2026. They had first mover advantage but no network effect, no moat, and are racing to stay ahead of infinitely resourced incumbents.
Not GP, and not saying I agree with them, but it may be worth remembering that Netscape had 90% market share at one point. Active user count may not be the moat you imagine.
Adoption of web browsers was also much lower when Netscape was dominant. 90% marketshare is less meaningful if you're only 1% of the way to the potential market size. Peeling away users who talk to ChatGPT every day is very possible, but harder than getting someone whose never used an LLM before (but does use your OS, browser, phone...) to try yours first.
I think the even better analogy than browsers is search engines. There aren't any network effects or platform lock-in, but there is potential for a data flywheel, building a brand, and just getting users in the habit of using you. The results won't necessarily turn out the same - I think OpenAI's edge on results quality is a lot less than early Google over its competitors - but the shape of the competition is similar.
Maybe! Switching search engines is also very easy, and the top story on the front page is someone no longer using Google, but we know in practice almost nobody does that. As technologists we're much more likely to switch and know people who would switch.
google search definitely has a moat. people build their websites to optimize for google's algorithm, therefore google users see better results -> google gets more users -> websites optimize for google -> repeat. Personally I never bother with 'bing SEO' or 'bing ppc ads'.
the AI has gotten good enough that click-thru-rate on informational searches has fallen off a cliff. I have some blog posts for SEO, their CTR is like 0.1% now.
google search took over becuse all search engines sucked and theirs didn't in a few important ways. AND by default, ads over to the side, clean interface.
Now all search engines suck and google's sucks just as bad or worse than the rest.
If someone were to follow the original google playbook and make a search engine that helped people find things (eg by respecting the query syntax rather than making 'helpful' suggestions and dropping words the user included in their query) and kept the ads separate and out of the way of results. They might well make a monster. But this is old tech so nobody cares and everyone thinks google is unassailble even while nobody likes them anymore. Is there /any/ money in search? I thought so but I must be wrong for it to get this bad.
Google search still has at least one competitive advantage: their crawlers are least likely to be blocked so they have the biggest index. AFAIK reddit is indexed by google but blocks all other search crawlers.
How many of those users are paying? Where is the profit? How many users will be willing to use ChatGPT if they had to pay? Might have to pull out the questions like its 2026.
Most people will stick to the free product. Claude isn't free and not widely known beyond tech circles. Gemini, despite being good, also has a marketing problem and most non technical users still default to chatgpt.com for their day to day AI usage but that can change as Google redirects users to Gemini from so many surfaces it owns
> This plan may include ads. Learn more
> When will ads be available in ChatGPT?
We’re beginning in the US on February 9, 2026
> Starting in February, if ads personalization is turned on, ads will be personalized based on your chats and any context ChatGPT uses to respond to you. If memory is on, ChatGPT may save and use memories and reference recent chats when selecting an ad.
You pay 8 USD / month and have higher limits and ads
99% of normies aren't paying for ChatGPT, there's a reason why they're pushing heavy for corporate welfare + government contracts. They're unable to sell to consumers so now they'll selling to governments while trying to lock-in contracts that subsequent people can't easily dismantle.
When they cost more to serve than they bring in, customer switching cost is vanishingly low, your competitor has revenue from other things and you don't.
> When they cost more to serve than they bring in, customer switching cost is vanishingly low, your competitor has revenue from other things and you don't.
What? "Other things"? This is really vague. Who says competitors have lower CAC? It's rather likely competitors pay more for a new customer, due to, very simply, brand.
They aren’t going to run out of money. They have existing customer relationships. They invented the model architecture of which GPT is a variant. Their existing enormous business is their own AI customer.
OpenAI’s business seems way more precarious than Google. Users get the tech either way.
"Anthropic" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, and I think a lot of people would avoid it simply because it doesn't have a catchy name like OpenAI or ChatGPT. It's also far more fun to say "I did a Google search" than "I did a Duck Duck Go search", and one still dominates over the other no matter the privacy concerns or how easy it is to switch. People can be simple like that.
I’m not sure it matters in Anthropic’s case that much - even people who use Anthropic models rarely think of the company as “Anthropic”. Their Claude brand is very strong, so much so the website is https://claude.ai etc, and you commonly see discourse about the company’s models where the name Anthropic never even appears. It’s Claude, Claude, Claude all the way down.
Claude has impressive mindshare in many engineering disciplines too, and given how many open source projects are a play on its name I’m not sure I’d argue it isn’t catchy either. Certainly rolls off the tongue easier for me than “chatGPT” does, which even Sam Altman their CEO agrees is an awful product name they are stuck with.
I can’t. I think they are one viral TikTok away from the pendulum swinging to Chat Gemini, which for most people, the no cost version is perfectly adequate
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