It seems possible OpenAI could maintain dominance in government/institutional markets while facing more competition in commercial segments, similar to how defense contractors operate.
It feels strange to say but I think that the product moat looks harder than the LLM moat for the top 5 teams right now. I'm surprised I think that, but I've assessed so many L and MLM models in the last 18 months, and they keep getting better, albeit more slowly, and they keep getting smaller while they lose less quality, and tooling keeps getting better on them.
At the same time, all the product infra around using, integrating, safety, API support, enterprise contracts, data security, threat analysis, all that is expensive and hard for startups in a way that spending $50mm with a cloud AI infra company is not hard.
Altman's new head of product is reputed to be excellent as well, so it will be super interesting to see where this all goes.
Grok winning the Federal bid is an interesting possible outcome though. I think that, slightly de-Elon-ed, the messaging that it's been trained to be more politically neutral (I realize that this is a large step from how it's messaged) might be a real factor in the next few years in the US. Should be interesting!
Fudged71 - you want to predict openai value and importance in 2029? We'll still both be on HN I'm sure. I'm going to predict it's a dominant player, and I'll go contra-Gwern, and say that it will still be known as best-in-class product delivered AI, whether or not an Anthropic or other company has best-in-class LLM tech. Basically, I think they'll make it and sustain.