Topic

OpenAI

A collection of 22 issues

Token Cost Conundrums

A couple of weeks ago, I highlighted a couple of pieces by Anjali Shrivastava who made the point that a token is not a fixed unit of cost. Today’s piece is a follow-up driving the point home that even though every model charges its API customers per token, tokens

The Pendulum Between Intelligence and Knowledge

Over the last week or so, I have started noticing an interesting development that is worth highlighting. Let’s start with Microsoft’s announcement yesterday. From Microsoft’s blog yesterday (emphasis mine): “Today, Researcher—Microsoft 365 Copilot’s deep research agent for work—takes a significant step forward. Designed to

OpenAI's Dilemma

WSJ yesterday had an interesting reporting on why OpenAI is pondering to focus more on enterprise. Some excerpts from the piece: “OpenAI’s top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a “do everything all at once”

Frontier AI Economics

When I say frontier AI model developers have somewhat “speculative” economics, I do not intend to mean it is destined to be bad even though “speculative” does have negative connotation. What I want to highlight is the range of outcomes for frontier AI model developers is still fairly wide, an

The Misunderstood Utility of Search Ads

I have been increasingly noticing an overwhelming negative perception on search ads. Ben Thompson often mentions how search ads can feel like skimming the advertisers as Google collects rent on economic activity that would likely happen anyway. Notice this piece from 2022: “…oftentimes search ads feel like a rake on

The Ecosystem Advantage

Like “Spotify Wrapped”, ChatGPT yesterday let its users see their 2025 stats which was fun to go through. I almost exclusively use ChatGPT Pro model (with extended thinking) which makes it hard for me to casually chat with ChatGPT as it typically takes 10-20 minutes for each of my queries.

Sam Altman's Explanation

Jensen Huang in his recent Joe Rogan podcast had an interesting story from early years of Nvidia: “we convinced ourselves that chip is going to be great. And so I had to call some other gentleman. So I called TSMC…and I explained to them what we were doing. And

The "Edge AI" Bear Case

On “Invest Like The Best” podcast yesterday, Gavin Baker mentioned the following: “In three years, on a bigger phone, you’ll be able to run a pruned-down version of Gemini 5, Grok 4, or ChatGPT. And that’s free. This is clearly Apple’s strategy - we’re going to

Messaging Opportunity and Group Chat Dynamics

OpenAI has started piloting group chats for ChatGPT, initially in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan. It’s a simple idea with potentially big implications: bring multiple people and the model into the same conversation so the AI can search, summarize, draft, compare options, and keep a running context

The appeal of conversational commerce

First things first, let’s define “conversational commerce”. When you ask queries to an AI model or chat bot about something you want to buy, and based on the AI’s research you then take decisions and complete the purchase by ordering the product on the retailer’s website, that’