The play now seems to be less AGI, more "too big to fail" / use all the capital to morph into a FAANG bigtech.
My bet is that they'll develop a suite of office tools that leverage their model, chat/communication tools, a browser, and perhaps a device.
They're going to try to turn into Google (with maybe a bit of Apple and Meta) before Google turns into them.
Near-term, I don't see late stage investors as recouping their investment. But in time, this may work out well for them. There's a tremendous amount of inefficiency and lack of competition amongst the big tech players. They've been so large that nobody else could effectively challenge them. Now there's a "startup" with enough capital to start eating into big tech's more profitable business lines.
I don't know how anyone could look at any of this and say ponderously: it's basically the same as Nov 2022 ChatGPT. Thus strategically they're pivoting to social to become too big to fail.
I mean, it's not fucking AGI/ASI. No amount of LLM flip floppery is going to get us terminators.
If this starts looking differently and the pace picks up, I won't be giving analysis on OpenAI anymore. I'll start packing for the hills.
But to OpenAI's credit, I also don't see how minting another FAANG isn't an incredible achievement. Like - wow - this tech giant was willed into existence. Can't we marvel at that a little bit without worrying about LLMs doing our taxes?
I'm bullish on the models, and my first quiet 5 minutes after the announcement was spent thinking how many of the people I walked past days would be different if the computer Just Did It(tm) (I don't think their day would be different, so I'm not bullish on ASI-even-if-achieved, I guess?)
I think binary analysis that flips between "this is a propped up failure, like when banks get bailouts" and "I'd run away from civilization" isn't really worth much.
Most people don't care about techies or tech drama. They just use the platforms their friends do.
ChatGPT images are the biggest thing on social media right now. My wife is turning photos of our dogs into people. There's a new GPT4o meme trending on TikTok every day. Using GPT4o as the basis of a social media network could be just the kickstart a new social media platform needs.
chatGPT should be built into my iMessage threads with friends. @chatGPT "Is there an evening train on Thursdays from Brussels to Berlin?" Something a friend and I were discussing but we had to exit out of iMessage and use GPT then back to iMessage.
For UX The GPT info in the thread would be collapsed by default and both users have the discretion to click to expand the info.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/15/openai-is-reportedly-devel...
The play now seems to be less AGI, more "too big to fail" / use all the capital to morph into a FAANG bigtech.
My bet is that they'll develop a suite of office tools that leverage their model, chat/communication tools, a browser, and perhaps a device.
They're going to try to turn into Google (with maybe a bit of Apple and Meta) before Google turns into them.
Near-term, I don't see late stage investors as recouping their investment. But in time, this may work out well for them. There's a tremendous amount of inefficiency and lack of competition amongst the big tech players. They've been so large that nobody else could effectively challenge them. Now there's a "startup" with enough capital to start eating into big tech's more profitable business lines.