The Contrarian Strategy of OpenAI

Internally at OpenAI, insiders say that disagreements had emerged over the speed at which Altman was pushing for commercialization and company growth, with Sutskever arguing to slow things down. Sources told reporter Kara Swisher that OpenAI's Dev Day event hosted November 6, with Sam front and center in a keynote pushing consumer-like products was... See more

But just like the internet, someone will show up later and think about something like Uber and cab driving. Someone else showed up and thought, “hey, I wanna check out my friends on Facebook.” Those end up being huge businesses, and it’s not just going to be one model that OpenAI or Databricks or Anthropic or someone builds, and that model will dom... See more

A similar type of partnership with OpenAI will probably not be as profitable as search was; my guess is that Apple will be paying OpenAI, instead of the other way around, [UPDATE: I know longer believe this, and explain why in this post-WWDC Update] but the most important takeaway in terms of Apple’s competitive position is that they will, once aga... See more

My take on OpenAI is that both of the following are true:

• OpenAI currently offers, by far, the best product experience of any AI chatbot assistant.


• There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble.

It took 4.5 years and ~$1bn raised for OpenAI to launch GPT-3, which was their first PMF product. That breaks every “rule” in the startup world, around mvp and being capital light pre-pmf. Goes to show you that you have to define your own rules to get outsized success.