Weird to describe something they could really easily sell to non-coders as a "side quest".

I think programmers make the mistake of thinking generative AI is for us, when it is much more ominously about us.

Newsflash: a company that plans to be the most valuable business on earth and has a desperate need for revenue is not going to stay out of anyone’s lane if there is money to be found in it. If you can make an AI wrapper, so can they.

This actually looks like it has meaningful potential, and given how easily they could train it to connect to a whole bunch of off-the-shelf APIs running in data centres they control, looks like a little glimpse of the future, and of the kind of power the industry has gleefully handed to the crypto-for-your-eyeball-scans guy.

Cloud AI has been the face-eating leopard of the tech industry for the last three years. This is them just starting to chew. How long before they tweak it to generate intranet apps, mini stores, specific AI wrappers? Why wouldn’t a firm that has so much influence over data centre rollout, RAM and processor prices simply directly start using their code generation tools and data centres to build and run the work product?

Maybe some of the big firms who have been helping train ChatGPT to eat their lunch will now wake up to the need for open weights.

> There are already a bazillion ways to do this.

Which means non-technical ChatGPT users are a bit bewildered as to how to pick.

This makes that easy; I suspect normies will fucking love it. My boss will.

I think at this point assessments like this are more qualitative than quantitative. I use Codex far more than I use Claude for coding and my results are generally higher quality. I would not, however, go to someone and tell them that Codex is better than Claude generally. In large part it depends on how you use the model and the harness.

All of these "side quests" (and especially this one) are attempts to build a walled-garden.

Especially this. OpenAI will host it. OpenAI will throw "Sign in with ChatGPT" there. "Apps" will be built that depend on end users ChatGPT "connections". The app will fundamentally not work without an end-user having a ChatGPT account/subscription and "connected apps".

Having "the best model" will absolutely not support a $1T+ valuation. Owning the activity of 25-50% of internet users (assuming a split between OAI/Anthropic/Google/maybe-Meta), is.

OpenAI is trying to build a business to justify their valuation, while they pursue ASI at the same time.

Anthropic is just trying to get to ASI and relying on the blind faith of investors that there will be a return at the end.

What matters is which strategy is more effective for attracting investor capital, because neither can survive without it.

Is it surprising? Most devs at my company (2k+ employees) are using Oppus and casually burning millions token a day.

This take sounds like engineering not "getting" what product even does. OpenAI has a company to run and a business to build.

The frontier companies are scrutinized heavily for their trillion dollar valuations all without a clear mass-consumer use-case. They're trying stuff.

It’s pretty obvious that they are trying to lock in consumers.

They are trying to build an ecosystem that can capture the value of AI, whereas LLMs are quickly becoming a commodity.

Where is the moat? How can they convert users?

If you were sitting on a rocket burning cash to not crash you would do that too.

OpenAI has an enormous team working on Codex. The folks who train models are different people.

OpenAI models are not falling behind Anthropic. They just have different strengths.

in terms of building sites, gpt is ahead e.g. computer vision etc.

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