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Comment by Androider | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. You would have to be naive to build a company on top of this kind of API. LLMs are going to be become commodities, and this is OpenAI fighting against that fate as their valuation and continued investment requirements doesn't make any sense otherwise.

If you built on the Assistant API, maybe take the hint and don't just rewrite to the Responses API? Own your product, black box the LLM-of-the-day.

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> OpenAI fighting against that fate as their valuation and continued investment requirements doesn't make any sense otherwise.

Is it actually the case that OpenAI couldn't be viable if all they offered was a simple chat completion API on top of the web experience?

It seems to me the devil is all in how the margin plays out. I'd focus on driving down costs and pushing boundaries on foundation models. If you are always a half step ahead, highly reliable and reasonably cheap, your competitors will have a tough time. Valuations can be justified if businesses begin to trust the roadmap and stability of the services.

I'll tell you what's not working right now is the insane model naming scheme and rapid fire vision changes. This kind of stuff is spooking the technology leaders of large prospective customers. Only the most permanently online people can keep things straight. Everyone was super excited and on board with AI in 2024 because who wants to be left out. I think that energy is still justified in many ways, but we've also got to find a way to meet more of the customer base where they are currently at. Wrappers and agentic SDKs are not what these people are looking for. Many F500s already have a gigantic development team who can deal with deep, nasty API integrations and related state contraptions. They're looking for assurances/evidence that OAI's business & product line will remain stable for the next 5+ years before going all-in.

The point of the bear thesis on OpenAI is that training frontier models is extraordinarily expensive. They can’t produce cutting edge models, charge a cheap price, and make a profit all at once

Looking at all the „AI specialists” that popped up recently- I have feeling there is enough naivety out there for it to work.

Oh man, don’t look up “vibe coding”

Too late ;) I ran into 2 guys that were exactly bragging about „vibe coding” on meetups. I just nod ↕

It feels like I'm becoming way too old for all the new computer stuff. I spent 2 decades trying to use every language available to write reliable programs for everyone, and now the whole world is jumping in this black hole / black box controlled by a few big companies where the output is random and definitely not up to my own standards.

It's very sad because we were supposed to do better than those who came before us, but instead we're throwing everything in the trash for a so-called productivity that I don't think even exists out of the influencers' brains.

Me too. That resonates really strongly with my feelings.

I’m hoping that most people aren’t full steam in AI.

I haven’t had any coworkers who just rely on AI… I have had some bosses who do tho…

> You would have to be naive to build a company on top of this kind of API.

You have to be purposefully naive to be a cutting-edge tech entrepreneur in the first place. If you fully acknowledged every risk and roadblock ahead, you’d probably never start.

But that deliberate naiveté is exactly what’s required to launch a startup in VUCA-space. Outsized success comes from exploiting emerging complexities: betting despite ambiguity, adapting quickly on top of uncertainty, and turning volatility into advantage.

Recognising when something makes 0 business sense is an important skill for an entrepreneur.

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