Still thinking about the endgame. Its not obvious to me if OpenAI/Anthropic will become competitors to coding startups like Cursor or continue to be model providers.
OpenAI has been trying to get into the space with their multiple product offerings all called “codex” but execution has been lacking.
So this is very much a play at becoming more competitive in the space.
Right now, many small startups are essentially just thin wrappers around ChatGPT. Once it becomes clear which ideas and solutions gain real traction, providers like OpenAI/Anthropic can simply roll out those features natively removing any need for a third party.
In a sense, a lot of what happened with the mobile market. For example, there's no need for a QR scanner or document scanner app anymore, if your phone starts to offer it natively.
This type of bundling appears to be one of the strongest forces in the economy today, and I think comes about consistently due to a confluence of efficiencies of scale, coordination, and second-order effects of prestige (being able to hire and pay large numbers of outlier high performing employees, etc.)
I've learned not to bet against it, except in niche areas.
They’ll do both: continue to be model providers while also leveraging their position as model providers to own as many of the valauble markets in which models are used as possible. Kind of like Amazon and its role as both infrastructure provider and direct competitors to other sellers (on the shopping/logistics side) and SaaS vendors (on the AWS side).