Can a Startup Kill ChatGPT?

The destination chatbot market has become a knife fight for dominance. 

A year after OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT-4, Google and Anthropic have caught up in the quality of their chatbot products. They’ve both released public or private beta models (Gemini 1.5 Pro and Claude 3 Opus, respectively) that sport larger context windows than GPT-4. They also match GPT-4 by benchmark and surpass it in vibes, in certain cases.

OpenAI is still clearly the winner by popularity, though. I’d be surprised if Google or Anthropic truly threatens it for mainstream adoption in the near future. And I’m curious to see what OpenAI does next. I’d be willing to bet that the company has a compelling response up its sleeves. Today, though, I want to talk about startups.

How vulnerable is ChatGPT to disruption? Let’s say OpenAI maintains its dominant position against incumbents—will it be able to maintain it against disruption? 

Both Google’s Gemini mishap and the sometimes-backwards trajectory of ChatGPT response quality over the last few months suggest to me that large chatbot players are vulnerable to disruption—unless they modify their product strategy. Let me explain why.

A quick primer on disruption

The word “disruption” is used colloquially to mean any instance where a startup beats an incumbent, but in its original formulation, it meant something specific.