There’s about 5M software devs in the US so even at $1000/year/person spend, that’s only $5B of revenue to go around. Theres plenty of other uses cases but focusing on pure tech usage, it’s hard to see how the net present value of that equates to multiple trillions of dollars across the ecosystem.
It's the first new way of interacting with computers since the iPhone. It's going to be massively valuable and OpenAI is essentially guaranteed to be one of the players.
In 2006, I foresaw that the smartphone was going to exist and be significant. But at the time I carried a Sharp Zaurus which just identified me as a gigantic nerd, and the clearest company to invest in was... HP/Compaq for the iPAQ, in terms of the most forward-looking device.
Then Apple came out with the iPhone but it was not clear they were going to be the market leader. They were certainly not the first mover.
With OpenAI, I see even less of a moat. Someone else comes along, makes a better foundational model, and they've got a gigantic advantage. What does OpenAI have?
It's not windows mobile because OpenAI was first and is the clear leader in the market. Windows mobile was late to the party and missed their window.
Palm is closer but it's a different world. It's established that Internet advertising companies are worth trillions. It's only in retrospect that what Palm could have been is obvious.
Barring something very unexpected OpenAI is coming out on top. They're prepaying for a good 5-10 years of compute. That means their inference and training for that time are "free" because they've been paid for. They're going to be able to bury their competition in money or buy them out.
Windows mobile by the time it looked like the iPhone was late to the party. But windows had been releasing a mobile os for a long time before that. Microsoft was first, they just didn’t make as good of a product as Apple despite their money.
OpenAI is also first, but it is absolutely not a given that they are the Apple in this situation. Microsoft too had money to bury the competition, they even staged a fake funeral when they shipped windows phone 7.
Yep. It would have to be something that dramatic to render all the technology and infrastructure OpenAI has obsolete. But if it's anything like massive data training on a huge number of GPUs then OpenAI is one of the winners.
This is where the money is. Anthropic just released claude for excel. If it replaces half of the spreadsheet pushers in the country theyre looking at massive revenue. They just started with coding because theres so much training data and the employees know a lot about coding
