What does ChatGPT want me to do?
Every time I get an email from ChatGPT it leaves me both confused and worried about what the future looks like for OpenAI.
I get sporadic and random emails about everything from recipes to “self-care”. Even the copy feels confused. “Ask anything — really”. Here’s a push notification I just received a few minutes ago. This all feels just incredibly disjointed.
The ChatGPT brand, whilst household and very well known, feels all over the place. Dave Morin described OpenAI’s overarching brand narrative as “portfolio” the other day on his podcast, and I think that’s pretty spot on. OpenAI is trying to be everything to anyone. A jack of all AI-trades.
If OpenAI’s narrative is “portfolio”, Anthropic’s is probably “fear”, but of course they’re trying to establish “thinking” as another brand pillar too.
Google’s core narrative is probably “infrastructure” and Apple's might be their classic “it just works” (when it actually works…) alluding to local and on-device AI integrated into to all the apps.
Now, the counter to all this is, ChatGPT is probably the most mainstream and household brand name in all of AI, which sure counts for a lot. But the counter-to-this-counter is that ChatGPT’s once-dominant stranglehold on consumer AI seems to be slipping. Is ChatGPT at risk of becoming the Myspace of the AI era?
Some might say that this is just classic segmentation and focus. OpenAI is going after mums and normies (huge market), whilst Anthropic instead is going after knowledge workers and “ambitious people” (smaller but more valuable market per user?). But it’s not that simple IMO. OpenAI is pushing me to make fun selfies and figure out what to make for dinner, but also wants to own the future of agentic software engineering with Codex. OpenAI wants their cake and to eat it too.
Ultimately, OpenAI will have to fight really hard to maintain their share, given this market is just heating up. Apple is ready to launch Siri 2.0 and Gemini is already a first-class citizen of every Android device, of which there are billions. Google and Apple are both going to be very formidable competitors in the race to win the consumer/normie market.
Can OpenAI have it all? Can you win the suburban mums and the coders? Time will tell, but either way, it’s fascinating to see these giant players in the frontier lab space battle it out in the differentiation arena.