Openai has just spent $ 6.4 billion by acquiring IO, the emerging emerging company of Jony Ive. As a person who grew up by idolatrating the Jobs -Imp partnership – Toxican subscription, Marathon on Shareware, one of everything they have ever done – I understand the attraction. But this decision reveals the existential crisis of Openai: they play a game they have already lost.
Distribution kings have already won
Let us be clear at the end of the first part of the AI of consumers: Google and Apple will dominate, with Microsoft dragging on the desk and perhaps, possibly, the phones. They have what Optai is desperately lacking: material expertise, distribution channels and capital scale which even eclipses the opening rounds of Openai opening.
The equipment is not only another ditch – it is a gap where your competitors have decades of experience and you learn to swim. Leaning on your weakness is the way you cut your head by companies that do this in their sleep. Apple ships hundreds of millions of devices per year. Google Android operates on billions. Openai acquires a business that has never shipped anything.
Roads not taken
There are Openai paths could continue but will not. NSFW applications. Deep company that grows beyond its disinfected chatgpt. The autonomous agents who live in discord servers, slide in the iMessages, become real digital beings living in the Internet. But they will not touch these opportunities – too difficult to monetize, too dependent on the platforms of competitors, too frightening to contemplate the possibilities of distribution.
These niches are ripe for smaller players at higher risks, especially in open source. While Optai continues the shadow of Apple, the decreasing teams build the experiences of the AI that people really want but cannot obtain buttoned corporate platforms.
The burning platform
Instead, Openai is stuck in a brutal position. They desperately lead traffic to their website. Build an application that needs Siri’s permission to exist. Pour money over the fire just to follow the pace of competitors who can afford to burn money indefinitely. Google and Anthropic correspond to their capacities while Microsoft – their supposed partner – explains each bet.
The $ 6.4 billion for IO are not a strategy; It is despair. Although a lot of good come from it, the moment looked like the attention purchased, under a company that has built the product for the fastest growth of all time in a very discreet way. When your competitive advantage evaporates and your partners start to look elsewhere, you understand everything that could create a ditch. Even if this ditch is in territory where you are desperately exceeded.
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The open alternative that they will not take
Here is what would make me an open champion: make the equipment and the really open models. Let me personalize it, personalize it, develop it, really do it mine. I want to be able to trust this device with which I have such an intimate relationship. Let them create a platform where thousands of developers can build IA Openai’s experiences are too opposed to the risk to try.
I have no confidence in their business bravery, even with Sam at the helm. They continue the same game book at the closed ecosystem that Apple perfected decades ago, except without the advantages of Apple.
If I wanted a beautiful box locked with an AI inside, I will wait for the Apple version. At least it will work with my other devices.
Imperative infrastructure
AI is not another consumer product. For many, he is a life coach, a source of truth, a friend. This intimate relationship requires transparency, property and control that closed systems cannot provide.
Open source AI projects correspond or already exceed OpenAi performance while operating on local equipment. Elizaos, Mistral and others prove that community development goes beyond corporate R&D. While Openai burns billions on beautiful equipment, open communities are solving real problems today.
The safety argument for closed systems collapsed. When AI becomes as critical as electricity or water, owner control actively becomes dangerous. Switzerland obliges the open source for government systems because transparency allows security. Each violation on Equifax levels strengthens this truth.
The beautiful box that we could have
Here is the opportunity to look OPENAI opposite: Be anti-poultry. While Google and Apple lock users in their ecosystems, Openai could create something revolutionary – very open equipment running really open models. Imagine that the genius of the design of IVE create devices that we can really modify, personalize and make ours.
It is not only idealism; This is the strategy. OPENAI cannot deepen Apple or Out-Google Google. But they could pioneer something that is only the holder would dare to try: premium equipment that respects user sovereignty. Beautiful devices that developers can extend. Companions AI that users really have.
The acquisition of $ 6.4 billion IO should not be a defensive game. This could be the beginning of a new paradigm – one where Openai leads by opening rather than locking. They have excellence in the design of IVE, the vision of Altman and a moment in history when people are hungry for alternatives to Big Tech surveillance capitalism.
I want OPENAI to succeed. Not like another enclosed garden, but as proof that open systems can be as elegant as those closed. This empowerment of users and beautiful design do not exclude each other. The fact that the future of AI can live in a box that we have, modify and understand really.
The choice is theirs: to become another also ran in the breed of the closed ecosystem, or pioneer of the open future which we desperately need.
