RIP OpenAI. Here is what lies ahead for startups
Hint: Open source
OpenAI has just landed in deep chaos with founder and CEO, Sam Altman being fired from the company. While there is no clarity on what the actual reasons were (and I won’t get into it), here is what will happen in the next few days/weeks.
First of all, the generative AI revolution which OpenAI started will continue, albeit lesser momentum. Here is what I believe will happen:
A lot of Generative AI startups will lose momentum
This is not your standard startup leadership shakeup. 10,000’s of startups are building on OpenAI, and have assumed a certain degree of technical velocity and commercial stability. This instantly changes the structure of the industry - Aaron Levie
As somebody building on OpenAI, all I can tell you is that the next few days are going to be dark and dusty for most startups that were dependent on OpenAI LLM (which is still the best in the industry with no near competitor / Anthropic is very limited).
Apart from the fact that there are talks of a recession in 2024, this is the last thing startups wanted to deal with – but then, that’s life!
Developers will start moving out of OpenAI
It’s tough to trust a company which is in the middle of so much of chaos.
Given that most generative AI startups are heavily dependent on AI LLM providers (what else is powering their magic?), it will be a sane call to explore OpenAI alternatives.
GPT4 onwards will deteriorate.
We even felt that GPT4-turbo wasn’t that great, but with so much of chaos – expect a lot of engineers and researchers leaving the company. Clearly, there were different factions in OpenAI and each had their own version of AGI. Leaving those differences aside, the only force that took everyone along was Sam Altman – and with his departure, do not expect massive tech moonshots from OpenAI.
There won’t be any GPT-5 and I wouldn’t even touch the newly announced assistant APIs or vision APIs now.
Open source LLMs will win
As a serious business which aims to solve a problem statement using AI, you are better off trusting open source LLMs, training them on your data and host the infra.
And..Meta will now have a strong chance. With Llama 2, Meta is slowly catching up on – expect a full throttle attack and promotions soon.
Google will again back to…sleep
Where is Google Gemini? Google has not just been slow to respond, but the quality of its AI products is also questionable – with very little to talk about.
With OpenAI now under the bus, do not expect anything big from Google – now that there is no serious fight for its bread and butter, i.e. search engine /advertising business.
Back to OKRs for Google!
What do you think is going to happen post this OpenAI chaos? If you are a developer/maker, would love to know your early thoughts? What is your team talking about?