This was expected! This also signals that OpenAI has exhausted all innovation and belief that they are going to be profitable long term.
OpenAI is trying to build a product that’s sticky which keeps people locked in. Right now they don’t have any moat and stickiness. They are trying social network to create the lock-in effect.
My prediction is that they have a year till all major mobile phones have competent, native AI baked in so they are afraid of losing market share and might want to make hay while the sun is still shining.
Side-point - I'd even put an asterisk on OpenAI's innovation. a) Initial release was an amalgamation of prior research (valid) b) Subsequent models have for the most part been upgrades + optimizations (new iphone models aren't innovations), and c) their products are essentially emergent behaviors of a technology that is already a commodity (or ideas taken from the wider ecosystem). Not to say they aren't great engineers!
By constantly being in the headlines, they've given competitors lots of room to catch up.
- Open-Source models released this year are comparable with commercial ones from ChatGPT
- NVIDIA to release 3k USD/EUR tiny AI-box that can run those beefy models for your own use cases very fast
While majority of people will be fine with "ai-ligh"t on their phones, enthusiasts can just invest 3k EUR/USD one time and run their own private, personalized, heavy and maybe most importantly uncensured AI using open source models.
I’m curious how well their recent “improvements” around chat memory will impact portability between AI’s.
Most ChatGPT sessions I have these days include ChatGPT reminding me or referencing something that I only shared with it days or weeks earlier in previous chats. So far it does increase quality of the chats, although not valuable enough (yet) to prevent me from using a different model.
You can export chats (for now), a competitor could add the ability to import chats. It's just that so far OpenAI is the only one focusing on the consumer market (both Anthropic & Google seem to be more enterprise focused)
Eh, I think it's actually something subtly different. I think OpenAI does believe that a moat exists and actually that they're on the losing end of it. They seem to have realized that Google is going to (arguably already has) eaten their lunch because of their privileged internet content scraper. Google can/has amassed more data than OpenAI could ever hope to because they provide reciprocal value to the sites they index, so much value that Googlebot gets let through captchas and paywalls. I think this is OpenAI trying to get some momentum that convinces site owners to not just up and block them.
Because the first thing you have to do to surface your products on ChatGPT is opt your site into the scraper.
I have a hard time believing that the differentiating factor between the top models is data volume. Sure, Google has all of the internet mirrored internally, but the vendor models are seeing unfathomably large collections. Clever engineering is doing more to getting better performance. I doubt DeepSeek had better English datasets than OpenAI or Google.
OpenAI is trying to build a product that’s sticky which keeps people locked in. Right now they don’t have any moat and stickiness. They are trying social network to create the lock-in effect.
My prediction is that they have a year till all major mobile phones have competent, native AI baked in so they are afraid of losing market share and might want to make hay while the sun is still shining.