OpenAI shook the planet with something fairly groundbreaking. It's closer to the iPhone in the rapid impact it had, moving a lot faster than the iPhone did, than the extension of a payment processor made easier (which is what Stripe is).
Stripe, Airbnb, Doordash, Uber etc. They're services that add value by extending existing concepts to the Internet or in a slightly better way. There's nothing revolutionary or earth shaking about them. They're eBay, taking auctions and putting it online; it's not revolutionary, it's modestly evolutionary. They certainly add very real value (although Airbnb's value add at this point may be going backwards; most services peak in value creation at some point before heading south).
The connected world took notice of GPT extremely rapidly. Only a few tech lightning strikes have been like that in the past 50 years, and only a few have moved very fast.
Downplaying the dramatic impact of GPT 3 / 4 would be silly, frankly. And we're only in the first or second inning. It has set off a remarkable chain reaction that is reverberating globally. It's a eureka moment the likes of which you only see a few times in a lifetime if you're lucky.
Openai hasn't really proven itself to be a profitable business so the economic research is at best incomplete.
I'm sure AI has real value, but what percent of that comes from LLMs and what contribution OpenAI will wind up making to the business of AI is not very clear. I don't really think the world will be different in ten years than it would have been without openai.
I would be willing to bet a lot of money that OpenAi will change the world 10 fold more than Stripe, Airbnb, and all other YC companies combined in the next 10 years
yeah sure, they just packaged Google's research and put it behind an API
you can make comments like this for just about any product taken to market and downplay the value of the making it mass market, affordable, usable, etc
