Palm is closer but it's a different world. It's established that Internet advertising companies are worth trillions. It's only in retrospect that what Palm could have been is obvious.
Barring something very unexpected OpenAI is coming out on top. They're prepaying for a good 5-10 years of compute. That means their inference and training for that time are "free" because they've been paid for. They're going to be able to bury their competition in money or buy them out.
OpenAI is also first, but it is absolutely not a given that they are the Apple in this situation. Microsoft too had money to bury the competition, they even staged a fake funeral when they shipped windows phone 7.
> Barring something very unexpected
Like the release of an iPhone?
Blackberry was a big deal for a while, too
Then Apple came out with the iPhone but it was not clear they were going to be the market leader. They were certainly not the first mover.
With OpenAI, I see even less of a moat. Someone else comes along, makes a better foundational model, and they've got a gigantic advantage. What does OpenAI have?
This is where the money is. Anthropic just released claude for excel. If it replaces half of the spreadsheet pushers in the country theyre looking at massive revenue. They just started with coding because theres so much training data and the employees know a lot about coding
The reason I wonder about that is because that also seems to be the dynamic with all these deals and valuations. Surely if OpenAI would pay $30 billion on data centers, they could pay $40 billion, right? I'm not exactly sure where the price escalations actually top out.