Ben Thompson:
I’ve previously wondered if OpenAI might be like Twitter, another text-centric company that fell backwards into a huge market and never developed into a functional business because of it; if Twitter is a clown car that fell into a gold mine, OpenAI might be the short bus at the end of the rainbow. There’s supposed to be a pot of gold there, but it never quite seems to materialize, the colors are fading, and worst of all there just isn’t much evidence that anyone knows what they are doing or that there is any sort of overarching plan. Ads are bad, until they’re the plan; Meta execs are hired en masse, and the ads that launch are low-effort keyword-driven offerings; Apple is a partner until Jony Ive is hired, but he’s still doing projects for Ferrari; meanwhile, Anthropic is focused on the enterprise and shipping, Google is encroaching, and the answer to that is to buy a podcast? What is going on here?