A short monologue by Sam Altman (recorded Jan 9, 2025) explaining his view on competitors and OpenAI's strategy: he pays limited attention to competitors, believes OpenAI focuses on discovering the next paradigm and doing hard-to-see-first breakthroughs, and expects others will rapidly copy once something is proven possible.
Chapters
I won't say we, like, totally ignore competitors because I think everybody pays a little bit of attention and, you know, there's like some value. It can give you some inspiration, whatever. But I don't know what our market share is right now. I would bet, like, deep into the 90s, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. And we try. We're just trying to, like, figure out the next paradigm and the next great idea. And if other people, like, want to chase to where we are right now, I don't think that's going to be a great strategy. It's certainly not the strategy we're going to go pursue. Like, we just. My hope is that every year we do something amazing that people thought was impossible. Once you know that something's possible and roughly how to do it, it always gets copied quickly. That's not the hard part. The hard part is figuring out what it is and doing it first when you don't know it's possible. So we'll keep doing that. Other people will keep copying where we've been, and I'm kind of fine with it.