(Stratechery)
Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!
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On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.
- OpenAI’s Windows Strategy. The current touchpoint for platform power is the smartphone, where Apple and Google share a duopoly. A better analogy for OpenAI’s ambitions, however, is Microsoft and the way that Windows controlled the PC industry: platform power didn’t just come from controlling applications on top of Windows, but the OEM ecosystem underneath. If OpenAI builds AI for everyone, then they are positioned to extract margin from companies up-and-down the stack — even Nvidia. And, as a necessary bonus, they position themselves to be the primary recipient of all of the speculative investment in AI, thus making the newly promised $1 trillion of infrastructure deals a reality. — Ben Thompson
- Sam Altman and Boundless Ambition. This week’s Stratechery Interview with Sam Altman was shorter than most (40 minutes) but dense with thought-provoking answers on OpenAI’s business, including about 10 different thoughts from Ben and Altman that could have turned into hour-long conversations of their own. Specifically, though, in the midst of daily hand wringing over whether today’s AI investing is rational, it was clarifying to hear from the CEO at the center of all the frothiness, as the story of the moment is actually quite simple: Altman sees once-in-a-lifetime opportunities in both the consumer and enterprise spaces (“it’s not like you use Google at home and a different company at work”), and given the progress he sees on the research side and where he expects models to be in the near future, OpenAI is placing “company scale” bets today to ensure they have infrastructure ready for tomorrow’s demand. Whether those bets pay off, and how, are questions that will occupy the entire tech ecosystem for the next several years. — Andrew Sharp
- The Future of Creation. We’re one week out from Sora madness, and I enjoyed Ben’s Article on Monday comparing the underwhelming reception of MetaAI’s Vibes update with the rapturous adoption of Sora. What I found most interesting about Sora is that for the first few days after joining I could not spend more than two minutes in the app before getting sick of the content (one can only handle so many Sam Altman cameos and/or Pikachu movie parodies). By the weekend, though, I’d learned how to make videos starring my dog, Ollie, and then Bill Bishop’s dog, and found myself spending far more time in the app and sharing videos with friends. According to Sam Altman, I was not alone (“30-something percent of active users were active creators”). The profound implications of that sort of shift—from AI-enabled consumption to AI-enabled creation—anchor the second half of Ben’s analysis on Monday, including questions about the future of creative expression, and perhaps the future of Meta’s business. — AS
Stratechery Articles and Updates
Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber
Asianometry with Jon Yu
Sharp China with Andrew Sharp and Sinocism’s Bill Bishop
Greatest of All Talk with Andrew Sharp and WaPo’s Ben Golliver
Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson
This week’s Stratechery video is on The YouTube Tip of the Google Spear.
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