OpenAI Has No Moat, No Tech Edge, No Lock-in and No Real Plan, Analyst Warns
- Reference: 0180832490
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/1849221/openai-has-no-moat-no-tech-edge-no-lock-in-and-no-real-plan-analyst-warns
- Source link:
The company claims 800-900 million weekly active users, but 80% of them sent fewer than 1,000 messages across all of 2025, averaging fewer than three prompts a day, and only 5% pay. OpenAI has acknowledged what it calls a "capability gap" between what models can do and what people use them for -- a framing Evans reads as a polite way to avoid admitting the absence of product-market fit. Gemini and Meta AI are meanwhile gaining share rapidly because the products look nearly indistinguishable to typical users, and Google and Meta already have the distribution to push them. Evans compares ChatGPT to Netscape -- an early leader in a category where the products were hard to tell apart, overtaken by a competitor that used distribution as a crowbar.
On capex, Evans argues that Altman's ambitions -- claiming $1.4 trillion and 30 gigawatts of future compute -- amount to an attempt to will OpenAI into a seat at a table where annual infrastructure spending may need to reach hundreds of billions. But a seat at the table is not leverage over it; he compares this to TSMC, which holds a de facto chip monopoly yet captures little value further up the stack.
OpenAI's own strategy diagrams from late last year laid out a full-stack platform vision -- chips, models, developer tools, consumer products -- each layer reinforcing the others. Evans argues this borrows the language of Windows and iOS without possessing any of the underlying dynamics: no network effect, no lock-in preventing developers from calling a different model's API, and no reason customers would know or care which foundation model powers the product they are using.
[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2026/2/19/how-will-openai-compete-nkg2x
Hoarding resources for the sake of hope? (Score:3)
Sounds like a plan, when no one can afford a home computer and all the computing is now hoarded in the datacenter/cloud/server... profit?!?
Fight Fire with Fire - Create LocalAI (Score:5, Interesting)
No, we don't need someone else spying, content-stealing billionaire-propping AI. We need something that can be downloaded locally, run on our 12TF video card, and lock out the billionaires who have already done too much damage to our society.
Note: I am against two computer technologies: blockchain and as-deployed AI. I guess that is why Slashdot gives my posts a level-1 initial value.
Memory chip moat. (Score:1)
Didn't they buy up like half the memory chips, which caused a massive shortage starting in September?
Re: Memory chip moat. (Score:1)
OpenAI is only planning to buy those chips. But first they have to get the money. OpenAI has run out of big investors and Nvidia is getting shaky about round tripping. Now Sam Altman has to convince big banks that Gemini and Claude Code aren't going to turn ChatGPT into a streak in a pair of dirty underpants. I won't be surprised if we see OpenAI dramatically scale back all those big expensive capex plans in the near future.
"80% of them sent fewer than 1,000 messages" (Score:3)
Who asked?
"Analyst invested in other companies claims OpenAI is no good."
The Long Term (Score:1)
If AI continues driving the marginal cost of intelligence and production toward zero, it may eventually undercut the very mechanism capitalism relies on: the wageâ"labor loop that generates purchasing power and demand.
for coding (Score:2)
For coding purposes, Anthropic's Claude wins hand down in my experience and Gemini is next. GPT is several months behind in quality, and Meta is barely visible.
OpenAI merely needs to be shipping superior product in order to do well in that space, and there's still plenty of runway for them. The real danger for them in my opinion is losing the tech race.
Mostly agreed, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
"its product roadmap is dictated by whatever the research labs happen to discover rather than by deliberate product strategy"
This is the way leading edge research is done
You can't have a "deliberate product strategy" when inventing totally new stuff
yeah, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
They're spending a trillion dollars without a plan and without a product. They are literally disrupting every single consumer electronics supply chain for the next three years without a plan and without a product.
Re: (Score:3)
Not to mention inflating stock market indices and laying the groundwork for a bubble burst followed by a recession.
Re: yeah, but... (Score:1)
I like to see it as proof that we do have the money to spend on non-capitalism things that people claim we don't. Just need the will to tax and implement it.
Re: yeah, but... (Score:2)
The interesting thing will be what we accomplish with all the compute added once the bubble bursts. Protein folding and biotech in general could see ultra cheap compute, which could lead to some major breakthroughs.
Re: (Score:1)
Only if that kind of use works on one of those NVidia H200s or whatever the newest one is.
Odds are, the software for protein folding would have to be rewritten to use an H200-style board.
Re:Mostly agreed, but... (Score:4, Informative)
If you are building solutions in the Microsoft Azure Cloud, it is very easy to get immediate access to GPT models to power your AI pipelines (whatever they may be). Very affordable, too.
By contrast, you cannot gain access to the Gemini models, and there is a big hill to climb to gain access to Claude. I don't know about Meta's models, I never checked.
My point being, this is a bit of a vendor lock in that makes use of GPT models the path of least resistance for many businesses that are building AI powered solutions. Maybe that will help. Though I think not for long.
GPT models are weaksauce compared to Gemini and Claude. They have been very far surpassed by these. Businesses that really need the power of these other models can use Google Vertex and integrate that with their Azure cloud, or set up an Anthropic account and just beam the web requests right over. Anthropic is problematic in that it doesn't allow you to ensure that data never leaves specific global regions (which many people need for legal reasons), but Google Vertex sure does.
So, I think that advantage that OpenAI currently has will not last long.
It is sad to see an innovator lose out, but that is also how things normally go. We tell ourselves feel-good stories about how copyright law or patent law can protect the small innovator against the huge corporations, but that isn't how things play out in realty. By hook or by crook, the major players wind up leveraging what they have to get control over the shiny new thing, and that's how the cookie crumbles.
Re: Mostly agreed, but... (Score:2)
then a late-to-market IBM buys them.
Re: (Score:2)
> You can't have a "deliberate product strategy" when inventing totally new stuff
That is 100% true. But it also isn't how trillion dollar companies get their valuations. They get it by having a deliberate product strategy and a strong moat that will defend their revenue for decades to come.
Re: (Score:2)
> You can't have a "deliberate product strategy" when inventing totally new stuff
Right. Which is why businesses don't do that. Publicly funded universities don't even do that.
Industrial research, even the legendary Bell Labs and Xerox Parc, is a small part of what a compay is otherwise doing. You might exploit something coming out of your research lab, but you're not depending on it.