OpenAI is Microsoft

From the jump, OpenAI’s true innovation hasn’t been its generative artificial-intelligence models but its marketing. Yes, it has become the de facto leader of the AI arms race, but it hasn’t necessarily done that by creating something revolutionary. Most of what you find inside the ChatGPT interface is simply a more stable version of what you might find in more obscure corners of the generative-AI industry. 

Instead, OpenAI has offered its customers something that’s simply good enough. It took the kind of imperfect, not-quite-there AI tools that huge tech companies and research institutes had been noodling on for years and successfully spun them up as almost-reliable software anyone can play with. And, if you judge the company on its hype, rounds of investment, and user numbers, this strategy has been a resounding success. 

OpenAI isn’t just a financial juggernaut — its new model launches are exciting. The company’s founder, Sam Altman, has joined the ranks of the Big Tech elites, even defeating a failed attempt to oust him last year. But as huge as this all is, it’s not unprecedented. 

In fact, nearly 30 years ago, another company had its own meteoric rise built atop fairly humdrum business software. This company created its own corporate fandom and fostered a staggeringly rich celebrity CEO. Today, this company has invested $13 billion in OpenAI and even integrated several of its products into the company’s own suite of technology. Any guesses?

It’s Microsoft.

But unlike Microsoft, which matured from being a ’90s hype machine to the company that makes the annoying software you’re forced to use at work, OpenAI doesn’t have a stable, reliable product to fall back on. More worryingly for its future ambitions, it hasn’t revolutionized computing, either.

Instead, OpenAI has cycled through various new models, all becoming a little less exciting each time. Take its newest Sora video model, which is good, but not so different from competitors like Runway. As these ever-shrinking developments have rolled out, it’s become clear that the most consistently useful application of OpenAI’s consumer AI — the kind its users pay $15 a month for — is for work: making spreadsheets, generating little doodles, basic organizational tasks. Not only are these pretty mundane accomplishments, but they’re downright too boring to be so expensive, both on the user side and for OpenAI to run and maintain.

To make matters worse, as innovative as ChatGPT and Dall-E once felt, OpenAI won’t be able to keep wowing consumers with technical advancements so great they’re still purely theoretical, like building a machine capable of replicating real human sentience. Once the novelty wears off, so will much of its mystique, and without that mystique, it’s a lot harder to ask for the $100 billion that the company’s leaders are hinting it might need to create artificial general intelligence. 

To complete the initial metaphor here, OpenAI is clearly following in Microsoft’s footsteps, but they haven’t figured out how to build a PC yet. Not only that, they’re not sure that figuring out the answer is even possible. Microsoft may have given us Clippy, but we still don’t have a good reason to use it. And, unlike Microsoft, which has a loyal customer base of places that are more than happy to pay for something stable and easy, there’s only so much longer people will be willing to keep paying companies like OpenAI once the hype train runs out of steam.

Read the other arguments for OpenAI's future here.

Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas write Garbage Day, an award-winning newsletter that focuses on web culture and technology, covering a mix of memes, trends, and internet drama. They also run a program called Garbage Intelligence, a monthly report tracking the rise and fall of creators and accounts across every major platform on the web. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.