2025.41: It's OpenAI's World, We're Just Living in It

Summary

(Stratechery) Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery! As a reminder, each week, every Friday, we’re sending out this overview of content in the Stratechery bundle; highlighted links are free for everyone. Additionally, you have complete control over what we send to you. If you don’t want to receive This Week in Stratechery emails (there is no podcast), please uncheck the box in your delivery settings. On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week. OpenAI’s Windows Strategy. The current touchpoint for platform power is the smartphone, where Apple and Google share a duopoly. A better analogy for OpenAI’s ambitions, however, is Microsoft and the way that Windows controlled the PC industry: platform power didn’t just come from controlling applications on top of Windows, but the OEM ecosystem underneath. If OpenAI builds AI for everyone, then they are positioned to extract margin from companies up-and-down the stack — even Nvidia. And, as a necessary bonus, they position themselves to be the primary recipient of all of the speculative investment in AI, thus making the newly promised $1 trillion of infrastructure deals a reality. — Ben Thompson Sam Altman and Boundless Ambition. This week’s Stratechery Interview with Sam Altman was shorter than most (40 minutes) but dense with thought-provoking answers on OpenAI’s business, including about 10 different thoughts from Ben and Altman that could have turned into hour-long conversations of their own. Specifically, though, in the midst of daily hand wringing over whether today’s AI investing is rational, it was clarifying to hear from the CEO at the center of all the frothiness, as the story of the moment is actually quite simple: Altman sees once-in-a-lifetime opportunities in both the consumer and enterprise spaces (“it’s not like you use Google at home and a different company at work”), and given the progress he sees on the research side and where he expects models to be in the near future, OpenAI is placing “co...