It’s been a year of glossy profiles, breathless accolades, and funding billions for OpenAI, but the ChatGPT-maker is far more vulnerable than the popular narrative suggests. Amid a seemingly unstoppable ascent, it’s facing fierce competition, a rising open-source movement and pressure to deliver hits in an unpredictable discipline. Surprisingly, its perch atop the AI field is less than rock solid.
OpenAI’s weakness stems in part from its strength. It popularized generative AI by taking others’ innovations — like the transformer model — and building stellar products on top of them. But now that the entire world is cued into AI, it’ll be much more difficult to take advantage alone.