Except AI companies are not a monopoly, never mind a natural monopoly. When ChatGPT first released it was popular to predict the death of Google because they were "so far behind".

Well after a certain point people have to smell the roses, so to speak. You don't get to control your business 100%, the market tells you what to do a lot of the time.

I think, the reality is, as models become more competitive they are becoming commodities. There's really no reason an app has to be built on GPT, or Gemini. It makes much more sense for apps to be "model agnostic" and let their customers choose which models to use.

I think, if OpenAI sticks to just trying to make their own apps for everything, they will be outrun. People will make apps outside of their ecosystem and will just use them as an API dumb pipe, regardless of if OpenAI wants that. And if they don't want that and restrict it, then their models will fall to the wayside as more competitive models which DO allow that take their place.

They're in a bind here, which is probably why we are seeing this announcement. OpenAI can see the writing on the wall for them.