I think OpenAI is screwed long-term, and their leadership knows it. Their most significant advantage was their employees, most of whom have now left for other companies. They're getting boxed in across every segment where they were previously the leader:
- Multimodality (browser use, video): To compete here, they need to take on Google, which owns the two biggest platforms and can easily integrate AI into them (Chrome and YouTube).
- Pricing: Chinese companies are catching up fast. It feels like a new Chinese AI company appears every day, slowly creeping up the SOTA benchmarks (and now they have multimodality, too).
- Coding and productivity tools: Anthropic is now king, with both the most popular coding tool and model for coding.
- Social: Meta is a behemoth here, but it's surprising how far they've fallen (where is Llama at?). This is OpenAI's most likely path to success with Sora, but history tells us AI content trends tend to fade quickly (remember the "AI Presidents" wave?).
OpenAI knows that if AGI arrives, it won't be through them. Otherwise, why would they be pushing for an IPO so soon?
It makes sense to cash out while we're still in "the bubble." Big Tech profits are at an all-time high, and there's speculation about a crash late next year.
If they want to cash out, now is the time.
I'd agree with all those facts about the competitive landscape, but in each of those competitors, there's enough wiggle room for me to think OpenAI isn't completely boxed in.
Google on multimodality: has been truly impressive over the last six months and has the deep advantages of Chrome, YouTube, and being the default web indexer, but it's entirely plausible they flub the landing on deep product integration.
Chinese companies and pricing: facts, and it's telling to me that OpenAI seems to have abandoned their rhetorical campaign from earlier this year teasing that "maybe we could charge $20000 a month" https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/05/openai-reportedly-plans-to....
Coding: Anthropic has been impressive but reliability and possible throttling of Claude has users (myself included) looking for alternatives.
Social: I think OpenAI has the biggest opportunity here, as OpenAI is closest to being a consumer oriented company of the model hyperscalers and they have a gigantic user base that they can take to whatever AI-based platform category replaces social. I'm somewhat skeptical that Meta at this point has their finger on the pulse of social users, and I think Superintelligence Labs isn't well designed to capitalize on Meta's advantages in segueing from social to whatever replaces social.
> OpenAI knows that if AGI arrives, it won't be through them. Otherwise, why would they be pushing for an IPO so soon?
an ipo is a way to seek more capital. they don't think they can achieve agi solely through private investment.
> an ipo is a way to seek more capital. they don't think they can achieve agi solely through private investment.
private deals are becoming bigger than public deals recently. so perhaps the IPO market is not a larger source of capital. different untapped capital, maybe, but probably not larger.
Unfortunately I think you are wrong. Their most important asset is the leadership role of the company, the brand name and the muscle memory. Other employers may come and go - on a system level this doesn’t look important as longer as they can replace talanted folks with other talanted ones. This seems to be the case for nowhere
Have to agree if services likes Deepseek remain free or at least extremely cheap I don’t see a long term profitability outlook for OpenAI. Gemini has also greatly improved and with Googles infrastructure and ecosystem … again long term outlook doesn’t look promising for OpenAI.
> It feels like a new Chinese AI company appears every day
The average joe is not using them though, for the general public AI is ChatGpt.
What about just search? I basically never use google anymore and am perfectly happy to pay for OpenAI
> most of whom have now left for other companies
Is there like a public list of all employees who have transitioned or something? As far as I know there have been some high profile departures.