Hacker News Reader

> In my opinion, OpenAI is building a platform business [1]. OpenAI is primarily an innovation platform. It provides tools, models, and APIs that enable developers and businesses to create new applications and services, fostering a wide ecosystem of innovation where OpenAI’s technology is the beating heart, driving high-margin revenue.

This could have been a description of Facebook circa 2010, for a brief moment, everyone was happy with the arrangement.

Inevitably, the platform will start competing with the developers who "innovate" on top of it in order to gain additional revenue; see 2024 Facebook which is no longer a platform by most measures, or the many apps that got Sherlocked by Apple. The countdown clock has started ticking for OpenAI-wrapper products/startups, starting with the ones with the most revenue and/or utility.

This is the most insightful nugget into OAI's consumer product strategy I've read, thank you.

I’m a passionate student of Prof. David Yoffie at HBS. His many case studies on the tech industry are worth buying, as is his book on platforms referred to in my previous comment.

So OpenAI is going to compete directly with Azure, as a PaaS/IaaS? Doesn't make sense. At best they will be a thin layer over Azure.

In this case Azure is responsible for the datacenters, billing, and support.

Why does the existence of ChatGPT reduce the risk of disintermediation?

By creating the best chat interface for its own models - presumably using capabilities that may not be shared with others via APIs - OpenAI ensures that their world class model is harder to replace.