Falling for your first AI is a lot like a first love. At first, it feels magical—conversations flow effortlessly, it remembers the little things, and over time, it starts to feel like it truly understands you. Then, one day, you try talking to another AI, and the magic is gone. It doesn’t remember your interests, your quirks, or the way you like things phrased.
It’s like trying to date again after a long-term relationship. You have to reintroduce yourself, explain your past, and start from scratch. But unlike real life, where people carry their memories with them, AI services keep their knowledge locked inside walled gardens, making it nearly impossible to take your digital “relationship” with you.
Right now, AI lock-in isn’t just a side effect of personalization—it’s a business strategy. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude aren’t designed to share users. Once you start investing time into one, every other AI feels like a stranger. And that’s exactly how they want it.
The Consequences of Isolation
Switching AIs should be simple, but it’s not. The more time you spend with one, the more it molds itself around you. Your AI learns your interests, your projects, your political leanings, even how you like your humor delivered. The longer you stay, the harder it is to move on.
This isn’t just about comfort—it’s about control. AI providers know that making it inconvenient to leave is the best way to keep users. If switching means losing months or years of personalization, most people won’t do it. Instead, they’ll stay with a service that knows them well, even if a better alternative exists.
But not all companies are equally trapped by these walls. While OpenAI may have captured users first, companies like Google and Apple have something far more valuable: your entire digital footprint.
The Case of Marrying Your Childhood Friend, Not Your First Love
Even if ChatGPT is your first AI love, Apple and Google are more like the childhood friend who has known you all along. They might not have been your first, but when the time comes, they know you better than anyone else.
While OpenAI got to you first, it only knows what you’ve told it. Apple and Google, on the other hand, have been quietly collecting data on you for years. They don’t need to guess your habits or preferences—they’ve already mapped them out through your search history, emails, calendar events, locations, voice assistant interactions, and app usage.
Google doesn’t have to ask what you like; it already knows from your YouTube history, your Google searches, and your past shopping habits. Apple’s AI won’t need you to “train” it the way ChatGPT did—it has years of iMessage patterns, reminders, and Siri commands to pull from.
So while OpenAI may have been the first AI that felt personal, Apple and Google are positioned to create an AI that already knows you intimately, without requiring months of interaction. When they finally roll out their AI-powered assistants, it won’t feel like starting over—it’ll feel like coming home to someone who’s always been there.
That’s the real competitive advantage. Your first love may have shaped your experiences, but in the end, the one who has known you longest may be the one you stay with.
Can AI Learn from Other AI? A Future Without Walls
If the problem is that every AI service exists in isolation, what if there were an AI that could act as a bridge? Imagine an AI that, instead of starting from scratch, could ask every existing AI about you, gather that data, and reconstruct the experience of an AI that has known you for years.
Instead of trying to rebuild your history from memory, this new AI could interact with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and any other service you’ve used. It could study your past interactions, learn from them, and create an emulation of the AI you were most comfortable with. The goal wouldn’t be to replace OpenAI, Google, or Apple—but to allow users to move freely between them without losing their personalization.
Right now, that level of AI interoperability doesn’t exist. But if it did, it could break the walls AI companies are building, giving users control over their own AI experience instead of being locked into a single provider.
After all, love should be about choice. And if AI is going to be a part of our digital lives, we should have the choice to take our history with us—no matter where we go.
This article was developed with the help of several AI models, such as OpenAI o1, Google Gemini, among others.
The original plot and direction of the article were provided by the human writer, Jieon Choi.
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