Today I’m going to walk you through a fairly unique position: that OpenAI is just another boring AI startup lacking any meaningful product roadmap or strategy, using the press as a tool to pump its bags while very rarely delivering on what it’s promised. It is a company with massive amounts of cash, industrial backing, and brand recognition, and otherwise is, much like its customers, desperately trying to work out how to make money selling products built on top of Large Language Models.
OpenAI lives and dies on its mythology as the center of innovation in the world of AI, yet reality is so much more mediocre. Its revenue growth is slowing, its products are commoditized, its models are hardly state-of-the-art, the overall generative AI industry has lost its sheen, and its killer app is a mythology that has converted a handful of very rich people and very few others.
That’s why I believe OpenAI will eventually go down the shitter, because they don’t have a good usecase. Instead, they’re trying to do a “one fits all” approach and burn a ton of money in the process.
Companies like Claude Code might be here to stay, because they’re running (and improving) their own models and they focus on a single usecase. Claude is already much better than ChatGPT when it comes to generating useful code.
But we’ll see what happens when the bubble inevitably bursts, because they all seem to be hitting a ceiling already and the improvements within each iteration get more and more marginal.
The “undifferentiated service for all the world” business seems to eventually pivot to advertising. Facebook, Google, etc.
So eventually ChatGPT won’t shut up about the new Ford Maverick.