How do you brand intelligence?

1.5 million people quit ChatGPT over the weekend. Claude even built a tool to help you port your memory across. People are switching AI like they switch coffee shops it seems...

But what's interesting is that the boycott wasn't about capability, it was about VALUES.

Altman's government contract play vs Anthropic's perceived backbone.

Nobody left because the chatbot got dumber. They left because they didn't like the people running it. That's new and it changes a lot.

Because as these tools converge (and they will, at least for a spell) the smartest model won't win. The most liked one will. We're choosing companions, not calculators.

Which means we're about to witness something beautifully ridiculous… a full-blown brand war between products that can literally think, but can't feel a thing.

Expect emotional campaigns, staked-out beliefs, subjective reasons to pick one over another and heavy investments in experience. All the gloriously irrational tactics that have sold us fizzy drinks, cars and trainers for decades.

But here's the irony. Figuring out how to differentiate a commodity on brand, gut feeling and irrational preference requires the one thing that isn't artificial….