Comment by dzonga
13 hours ago
open-ai have proven they can make good / decent models but business strategy is just spray and pray.
they need to pick a lane and optimize for it. coz at their size they can't serve the application layer (a.i startups who can fine-tune models will eat their lunch)
if they gonna do a consumer play - then go ham on that.
otherwise they're gonna get caught in the dreaded middle valley.
They have a lot of compute, so I think it makes sense to spray and see what works. Anthropic is limited in that regard, and focused in coding/tech, but OpenAI don't need to do the same. They even got the lead without having to focus in coding only, which is remarkable.
Do they still do Atlas, the web browser? They are indeed throwing shit at the wall, seeing what stick.
a la Google.
Google went to that model after they had a massive cash cow though.
You can afford to play silly buggers when you have dumpster trucks of money backing up to your door every day see also: Meta.
I think the comparison is unfair. Google had/have a product that was 10X better than anything else at the point of release (search then chrome). And they have several money making products like YouTube and android that are either singular or in a duopoly.
OpenAI doesn't have any of these things. They have products that they're paying for customers when the market they're in is rapidly converging on fighting for API reasoning as part of enterprise systems and fighting a race to the bottom for fickle consumer solutions that will be eaten by open source once they have to make money.
Maybe they had a brief window for dominance of information search (or maybe it was only ever going to last as long as Google releasing all their internal research) and maybe they had a brief moment of monopoly till Anthropic got going but theyre not in the same dominance position as Google.
They can't be seen to commit to strongly to a specific product experience, because if they are understood as a regular tech product business that has way different financial scaling considerations than "superintelligent everything-factory"
I suspect that half-assed announcements like this are a result of different people internally with conflicting incentives resulting in a split-the-baby solution.
Enterprise is eventually get caught (if it isn't already) by the Microsoft/Google. Because with office/teams/suite they were already in every enterprise, and that just added a new tool to existing offerings.
Provisioning and contracts and data retention was just an extension to review of existing ones.
Nobody serious is going to risk sending sensible data to OpenAI/Anthropic, etc because "the benchmarks have shown +8% performance there and +2% there". Irrelevant.