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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

It seems that OpenAI lacks a clear target audience, they try to be everything for everyone. Anthropic is targeting professionals / enterprise users.

I don’t fully understand why OpenAI lacks this focus, as clearly identifying a target market is one of the first things you do with a business strategy. But instead they just seem to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.

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I think this is too simplistic. Codex is increasingly useful for business usage. I use it for both technical stuff and doing non technical things with my inbox, google drive, etc. It's pretty good for that. And it's pretty clear that business users are very much untapped potential at this point. They need proper agents with tunable guard rails and all the rest.

It seems very competent at coding tasks as well. I don't think Anthropic has a huge edge on that front. It's more of a neck and neck race with proponents in both camps. I ignore most benchmarks at this point; I don't think they have much relevance for normal users.

I think it's actually necessary for both to try out different approaches. Nothing is set in stone yet when it comes to the UX of these things.

> I don’t fully understand why OpenAI lacks this focus, as clearly identifying a target market is one of the first things you do with a business strategy

Resource curse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

I've been inside companies that have struggled with this, and the real internal story goes like this:

   1. Surprise product growth
   2. Revenue go brr, org expands
   3. Everyone gets promoted as org expands
   4. Because the product sold itself, there was little selection pressure on the sales / customer success orgs to evaluate their effectiveness
   5. Leadership gets saturated with people who just aren't very good at their job
   6. None of those people get fired/demoted, because the company never had to develop "What to do with a bad leader?" muscles
   7. This eventually manifests as an increasing (customer) <-> (engineering) disconnect (as sales/cs aren't doing their job)
   8. People begin to ask why the company isn't doing (insert obvious thing)
   9. It's because VP-of-whatever is chasing fantasies instead of reporting customer needs to engineering

Tl;dr - Don't trust promotions made during the good times. Continuously reevaluate leaders.

They have the consumer market but want the enterprise market, because it's a lot more lucrative, so they're probably going to just keep chasing that even though there's no signs they'll stop losing to Anthropic. They don't need to do that much to keep the consumer market because of momentum.

Questionable whether the enterprise market really is the most lucrative. The biggest of big tech all have significant revenue from the consumer market. Compare Apple, Google, Meta, to IBM, Salesforce, ServiceNow.

Enterprise market is paying by token and using a lot of tokens. Consumer market is paying a subscription that they can't raise too high or they'll lose users to competition. Seems to me that the enterprise market scales a lot higher.

Have you seen many corporations complaining and caping usage to 20-200usd per developer per month. I doubt will change much. Many are considering on premise now.

it's really not much compared to the amount they are spending on training. 100 developers at $200 per month is just $20000

$240,000

The consumer market by and large pays $20/mo to get tokens in response to stuff like

"My friend hurt my feelings and I don't know how to approach the problem" routed to whatever the default model is.

Enterprise / B2B has always been easier and more lucrative. Once a large enterprise integrates with your product, they won’t move away unless there’s an actual issue. So then the “moat” becomes the contract.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is spending ludicrous amounts on things like a Sora-TikTok app in order to create a network effect, and failing at it.

Seems pretty obvious to me what the better strategy is.

Apple, sure. But Google and Meta are really advertising companies, whose income stream comes from enterprises, big and small.

Not to mention Google Cloud.

OpenAI actually never had a focus. Their VC pith was: once the AI is good enough, it will find our business model. They've raised money on that.

With that said you are right, it seems OpenAI got numbed by ChatGPT's initial success and tried to be the go-to brand for consumers... which is Google's playground.

Meanwhile, Anthropic led the B2B market with a clever segmented approach, and got well-paying customers.

Because they gained a HUGE amount of “normal” users and I think they feel desperate to monetise that. It’s their potential massive edge on competition, they just haven’t found any way to realise it and I suspect they won’t.

They keep asking chatgpt how to monetize and it keeps giving slop answers?

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