Founders

How often do "infra" companies like OpenAI turn into consumer powerhouse?

building far.quest & @wieldlabs.eth. cofounder at miy.com ventures. FID #274. Previously Square/Cash App. https://hiimnico.xyz/

Be specific.     

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FAANG usually got into infra after nailing the consumer side - AWS offered the infra they built for Amazon

I wouldn’t call OpenAI an infra company tho
They just did loads of research and built awesome software, tried a bunch of things and the API and consumer stuff is what found PMF

But all of FAAMG have big infra plays really

The open web is dead, long live the open web. ⌐◨-◨

Building /warpcast and /farcaster

— gabrielayuso.com

ya, Google search API was once usable. Now it is a shell of what it used to be.

Feels like OpenAI might go the same route, to offer less and less effective APIs as the consumer side overshadows the infra.

I'd say Google in the early days was similar to OpenAI. A research project that unlocked new capabilities so they packaged it into a simple UI.

A lot of infra, thin product.

How significant is conflict of interest?

There could be potential changes to OpenAI's API similar to Google's search APIs, when serving competing businesses

Never? Microsoft is the only one I can think of.

The key thing to understand here is that the infra for OpenAI was so deep that it needed them to package it to show its true potential