Not really. They’re successful because they created one of the most interesting products in human history, not because they have any idea how to brand it.

If that were the case, they’d be neck and neck with Anthropic and Claude. But ChatGPT has far more market share and name recognition, especially among normies. Branding clearly plays a huge role.

ChatGPT is still benefitting from first mover advantage. Which they’ve leveraged to get to the position they’re at today.

Over time, competitors catch up and first mover advantage melts away.

I wouldn’t attribute OpenAI’s success to any extremely smart marketing moves. I think a big part of their market share grab was simply going (and staying) viral for a long time. Manufacturing virality is notoriously difficult (and based on the usability and poor UI of ChatGPT early versions, it feels like they got lucky in a lot of ways)

I think that has more to do with the multiple year head start and multiple tens of billions of dollars in funding advantage.

And you think that is due to their model naming?

I prefer Anthropic's models but ChatGPT (the web interface) is far superior to Claude IMHO. Web search, long-term memory, and chat history sharing are hard to give up.

That's first mover advantage.

I think it’s success in spite of branding, not because of it.

This naming scheme is a dumpster fire. Every other comment is trying to untangle what the actual hierarchy of model performance is.

That's like making a second reading and appealing to authority.

The naming is bad. Other people already said it you can "google" stuff, you can "deepseek" something, but to "chatgpt" sounds weird.

The model naming is even weirder, like, did they really avoid o2 because of oxigen?

> but to "chatgpt" sounds weird.

People just say it differently, they say "ask chatgpt"

I normally use Claude, but "Ask Claude", but unless it's someone who knows me well, I say "Ask ChatGPT", or it's just not as claer; and I don't think it's primarily due to popularity.

Obviously they do. That's the whole point.