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Comment by gaigalas | Hacker News Reader

> Altman argued that future AI competition will be won through devices

What this really signals is the intention (which might be sincere or not) of getting some sort of OEM deal with some device manufacturer.

And yes, if the path to profitability is in shipping devices with OEM AI features, Microsoft and Google are clearly ahead.

It seems all venues to profitability are offensive to OpenAI current users. Ads, OEM, etc. This is a problem for them.

And yes, Apple can include lots of undesirable things in their products and still keep their cult following, that's why he mentions them.

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You want to restrict applications as much as possible without hindering their function. An assistant is only annoying if it can't actually do anything. If the hardware doesn't follow some cosy deal the user can swap out the API when they like, you would have to compete for real and forever.

Users can swap their search engines freely on all browsers but they often don't want to.

Because there is simply no need to. If there was one significantly better overall than Google (and not just a little better or better in just certain niches) people would switch.

Even if the products are better people don’t switch. Google organic has been a spam cesspool for a while with a few layers on top of ads and people don’t switch. I know some people that use Bing because it is the default of windows and they don’t switch.

I've used bing for a decent while but since they can't make a normal website that works on Firefox their slightly inferior results made me use Google again.

> What this really signals is the intention (which might be sincere or not) of getting some sort of OEM deal with some device manufacturer.

I assumed they were talking about their partnership with Jony Ive/IO and an internal hardware product, not partnering (not that they won't do that as well).

If you truly believe you have a revolutionary device, you don't need to advertise before its time. You wait in secret, and launch it in a big surprise.

I smell bullshit, and some kind of partnership in which OpenAI provides model access and some third party hardware manufacturing. I could be wrong though.

This news only came out after The Information leaked that OpenAI is working with Luxshare to begin manufacturing a consumer product [0] a couple months ago.

[0] - https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-raids-apple-h...

Wasn't the whole weird Johny Ive and Sam Altman cuddling imagery and announcement their public announcement of a 'device'?

Not officially. It was implied, but it wasn't hard data about their seriousness in comparison to subsequent hiring as well as their enlisting of Luxshare as a vendor.

What do you mean by not officially? They talk about hardware in the announcement. https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/

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