Maybe a basking shark filtering masses plankton but it’s no great white.

A great white would have launched a GPT api competitor far earlier and recognised the search replacement use case.

GPT3 came out in 2020. People had used it as a search like function in 2020, we’re coming up to 3 years and only now they’ve acted to then bum rush into a competitor that’s demo tanked the stock?

I do agree with you here.

There is a small smell of "we want to build this" vs "we should buy that"

Generally I'd agree, but I'd give Sam Altman more credit than this. He's been in this game for almost two decades, both as a CEO and as a VC investor.