OpenAI against the world
Ben Thompson: Apple’s 50 Years of Integration
It’s also worth noting that OpenAI has, in its relatively short life, managed to frame itself as a competitor to basically everyone in tech, from Google to Meta to Microsoft, only to find itself forced to pivot in the face of Anthropic and its focused approach on coding and productivity in the enterprise. The audacity of taking on everyone is impressive; the effectiveness of fighting everyone for everything may be less so.
I hadn't really thought about it in these terms before, but OpenAI has effectively positioned itself as competing with literally every single tech company in the world. What can't GPT do, you know? But they kind of have to, don't they? Their investment implies a valuation that makes them effectively as big as all the other big tech companies combined.
I don't know exactly how we're going to come down from this AI bubble, but it certainly seems like it will dawn on people that OpenAI could be a generational company in the long run. We could be celebrating their fiftieth anniversary in several decades, just as we're celebrating Apple's today.
However, several examples are notable deviations from the narrative that AI, and OpenAI specifically, will be taking over the world. Apple was seen as a laggard in AI development, and in fairness, they clearly saw themselves that way and invested billions in trying to catch up to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, but they failed miserably. And yet, they seem like they're going to be doing just fine. You need a computer to do all this vibe coding on. You need a phone to talk to an AI agent. Who makes the best computers and phones? Apple does.
Similarly, there's Anthropic, the company that some analysts derided in the past for being an incredibly niche AI player who got too many headlines for the number of users they had. They forced OpenAI to pivot several times because they focused their efforts on work and coding specifically. Now OpenAI has tried hard to pivot to get their Codex app to catch on to even a fraction of the extent of Claude Code.
And they've already entered their Elon era, where now they're talking about building a ChatGPT super app that combines a chatbot, a browser, and a code editor. I don't know if it's a law of nature, but it definitely seems to be a law of the tech space that once you start talking about building a super app, you're kind of flailing as a business.
