Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs of fraying

Does OpenAI have any fundamental advantage beyond brand recognition?

Talent? Integrations? Ecosystem?

I don't know if this is going to emerge as a monopoly, and likely won't, but for whatever reason, openai and anthropic have been several months ahead of everyone else for quite some time.

I think the perception that they're several months ahead of everyone is also a branding achievement: They are ahead on Chat LLMs specifically. Meta, Google, and others crush OpenAI on a variety of other model types, but they also aren't hyping their products up to the same degree.

Segment Anything 2 is fantastic- but less mysterious because its open source. NotebookLM is amazing, but nobody is rushing to create benchmarks for it. AlphaFold is never going to be used by consumers like ChatGPT.

OpenAI is certainly competitive, but they also work overtime to hype everything they produce as "one step closer to the singularity" in a way that the others don't.

Anthropic isn't really hyping their product that much. It just is really good.