This is the opposite: this is a push to make ChatGPT the operating system of the future. Apps won’t be on your phone or in a browser; they’ll be in ChatGPT, and if they aren’t, they simply will not exist for ChatGPT users. That, by extension, means the burden of making these integrations work — and those conversions performant — will be on third party developers, not OpenAI. This is the power that comes from owning users, and OpenAI is flexing that power in a major way.

This question of who will capture the most profit from the AI value chain remains an open one. There’s no question that the early winner is Nvidia: the company has become the most valuable in the world by virtue of its combination of best-in-class GPUs, superior networking, and CUDA software layer that locks people into Nvidia’s own platform. And, as long as power is the limiting factor, Nvidia is well-placed to maintain its position. What Nvidia is not shy about is capturing its share of value, and that is a powerful incentive for other companies in the value chain to look for alternatives. Google is the furthest along in this regard thanks to its decade-old investment in TPUs, while Amazon is seeking to mimic their strategy with Trainium; Microsoft and Meta are both working to design and build their own chips, and Apple is upscaling Apple Silicon for use in the data center.

I now have much more appreciation for OpenAI’s insistence on doing it all, for two reasons. First, this is a company in pure growth mode, not in decline. Tradeoffs are in the long run inevitable, but why make them before you need to? It would have been a mistake for Microsoft to restrict Windows to only the enterprise in the 1980s, even if the company had to low-key retreat from the consumer market over the last fifteen years; there was a lot of money to make before that retreat needed to happen! OpenAI, meanwhile, is the hottest brand in AI, so why not make a play to own it all, from consumer touchpoint to API to everything in-between?

Acquiring developers and users is not a chicken-and-egg problem: it is clear that you must get users first, which attracts developers, enhancing your platform in a virtuous cycle; to put it another way, first a product must Aggregate users and then it gets developers for free.