What is OpenAI business model if their models are second-best? Why would people pay them and not Meta/Google/Microsoft - who can afford to sell at very low margins, since they have existing very profitable businesses that keeps them afloat.
That's the question OpenAI needs to find an answer to if they want to end up viable.
They have the brand recognition (for ChatGPT) and that's a good start, but that's not enough. Providing a best in class user experience (which seems to be their focus now, with multimodality), a way to lock down their customers in some kind of walled garden, building some kind of network effect (what they tried with their marketplace for community-built “GPTs” last fall but I'm not sure it's working), something else?
At the end of the day they have no technological moat, so they'll need to build a business one, or perish.
For most tasks, pretty much every models from their competitors is more than good enough already, and it's only going to get worse as everyone improves. Being marginally better on 2% of tasks isn't going to be enough.
I know it is super crazy, but maybe they could become a non-profit and dedicate themselves to producing open source AI in an effort to democratize it and make it safe (as in, not walled behind a giant for-profit corp that will inevitably enshittify it).
I don't know why they didn't think about doing that earlier, could have been a game changer, but there is still an opportunity to pivot.
