OpenAI is releasing many products like the Sora video generator and Atlas browser, generating significant initial buzz. However, this "spaghetti at the wall" approach may lead to a portfolio of half-baked applications that lose momentum quickly, questioning the long-term sustainability and focus of its product strategy.
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OpenAI intentionally releases powerful technologies like Sora in stages, viewing it as the "GPT-3.5 moment for video." This approach avoids "dropping bombshells" and allows society to gradually understand, adapt to, and establish norms for the technology's long-term impact.
The obvious social play for OpenAI is to embed collaborative features within ChatGPT, leveraging its utility. Instead, the company launched Sora, a separate entertainment app. This focus on niche content creation over core product utility is a questionable strategy for building a lasting social network.
Critics argue OpenAI's strategy is dangerously unfocused, simultaneously pursuing frontier research, consumer apps, an enterprise platform, and hardware. Unlike Google, which funds such disparate projects with massive cash flow from an established business, OpenAI is attempting to do it all at once as a startup, risking operational failure.
The internal 'Code Red' at OpenAI points to a fundamental conflict: Is it a focused research lab or a multi-product consumer company? This scattershot approach, spanning chatbots, social apps, and hardware, creates vulnerabilities, especially when competing against Google's resource-rich, focused assault with Gemini.
By releasing Sora as an API for developers and businesses rather than a standalone consumer app, OpenAI reveals its core strategy. The goal is to empower enterprise use cases like ad generation, not to build a new video destination to compete with platforms like YouTube or TikTok.
Startups are becoming wary of building on OpenAI's platform due to the significant risk of OpenAI launching competing applications (e.g., Sora for video), rendering their products obsolete. This "platform risk" is pushing developers toward neutral providers like Anthropic or open-source models to protect their businesses.
The initial app integrations for ChatGPT lack a compelling "magic moment" and feel similar to Slack's app ecosystem, where connectors exist but are rarely used for complex tasks. This raises questions about whether users will meaningfully engage with another app marketplace.
OpenAI launched Sora 2 knowing it would generate copyrighted content to achieve viral growth and app store dominance, planning to implement controls only after securing market position and forcing rights holders to negotiate.
Companies racing to add AI features while ignoring core product principles—like solving a real problem for a defined market—are creating a wave of failed products, dubbed "AI slop" by product coach Teresa Torres.
Critics view OpenAI's sudden enterprise push not as a decisive strategy but as another reactive, "off-the-cuff" comment from CEO Sam Altman. This perceived lack of focus, spanning AI clouds, consumer devices, and now enterprise, raises doubts about their ability to execute in a demanding new market.