OpenAI: the Next Tech Giant?

It’s pretty rare for a company to transition from a research lab to a developer infrastructure provider to a behemoth consumer app in just a few years. But given the launch of ChatGPT plugins last week, there’s a fair chance this could end up being the story of OpenAI.

Plugins allow ChatGPT to browse the web and interact with services like Kayak and Instacart to perform tasks for users beyond just generating text. The news marks OpenAI’s definitive step out of the land of research and into a vastly ambitious and uncertain new world, competing to earn its place as perhaps the newest tech giant, alongside Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook.

Packy McCormick, never one to shy away from a bold optimistic claim, expressed his prediction for how this will turn out with the following meme:

Even if you’re not as bullish as Packy, it’s clear this is an important moment. My hunch is that soon we will all be using ChatGPT with plugins—or something like it—almost every day, for the foreseeable future. I don’t know who will be the dominant market player, or how the value will get captured, but the product/market fit of this emerging category of AI chat product is very real. It is on the same level of importance as the PC, the web browser, the search engine, and the smartphone. Seriously.

Last week, on the day that ChatGPT plugins were announced, I was at an AI conference hosted by Sequoia in San Francisco where Sam Altman was speaking. The announcement tweet dropped at 10 a.m., and you could practically see the news ripple through the attendees. Did you hear? Have you tried it? Wow, you had the beta? Damn…is it good?