The Contrarian Strategy of OpenAI

Main OpenAI dev day takeaways: (1) Existential crisis for AI wrappers and middleware. (2) Opportunity for people with good taste in UI and can figure out distribution creatively. Launching something useful has never been easier. The likelihood of being commoditized and cloned… Show more

But here’s the magic few people ever talk about …We’ve created more than $1.5 billion in value to Upfront from just 6 deals that WERE NOT immediately up and to the right.The beauty of these businesses that weren’t immediate momentum is that they didn’t raise as much capital (so neither we nor the founders had to take the extra dilution), they took ... See more

We generally lean towards picking more advanced commercial LLMs to quickly validate our ideas and obtain early feedback from users. Although they may be expensive, the general idea is that if problems can't be adequately solved with state-of-the-art foundational models like GPT-4, then more often than not, those problems may not be addressable usin... See more

buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success. But leanness is a

... See more