Is OpenAI the New AOL?

Question

I am old enough to have lived through the AOL era, and to remember that at one point AOL bought Time Warner. I lived the dot-com era and loved it all.I am also a fan of Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, and connecting the dots I can't help but wonder what's after what comes next.OpenAI is out there very prominently, but so was AOL; but the long game didn't belong to AOL, it was created by disruptive business models like Amazon/eBay, Yahoo->Google, MySpace->Facebook and others.At the same time timelines are faster and more compressed in this AI-era than in the internet era.So, what is around the corner? Who will leverage the second-to-market advantage standing on the shoulders of the early giants?

techfeathers · Accepted Answer

I do find it interesting that people seem to talk about perplexity and Anthropic as having the better products but openAI, but OpenAI is perceived as the obvious winner

dartos · Answer

Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.In the early internet days, there were no web-native companies. No entities really using the reach and software distribution power of the internet. It was a wide open pasture you could use to ship products and build communities.AI is not that. It&rsquo;s an algorithm and data, not an entire communication platform. IMO it&rsquo;s not even its own product category. Once the market stops being hyped, there won&rsquo;t be an AI industry, it&rsquo;ll just be another slice of the software industry.We have our big players. They&rsquo;ll win in the end. Just like AT&T did with telecom. They even came back from being broken up.