Ask HN: Is OpenAI the New AOL?

by SMAAART on 12/17/2024, 1:12:29 AM with 2 comments
I am old enough to have lived through the AOL era, and to remember that at one point AOL bought Time Warner. I lived the dot-com era and loved it all.

I am also a fan of Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, and connecting the dots I can't help but wonder what's after what comes next.

OpenAI is out there very prominently, but so was AOL; but the long game didn't belong to AOL, it was created by disruptive business models like Amazon/eBay, Yahoo->Google, MySpace->Facebook and others.

At the same time timelines are faster and more compressed in this AI-era than in the internet era.

So, what is around the corner? Who will leverage the second-to-market advantage standing on the shoulders of the early giants?

  • by techfeathers on 12/17/2024, 1:51:50 AM

    I do find it interesting that people seem to talk about perplexity and Anthropic as having the better products but openAI, but OpenAI is perceived as the obvious winner

  • by dartos on 12/17/2024, 1:22:09 AM

    Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.

    In the early internet days, there were no web-native companies. No entities really using the reach and software distribution power of the internet. It was a wide open pasture you could use to ship products and build communities.

    AI is not that. It’s an algorithm and data, not an entire communication platform. IMO it’s not even its own product category. Once the market stops being hyped, there won’t be an AI industry, it’ll just be another slice of the software industry.

    We have our big players. They’ll win in the end. Just like AT&T did with telecom. They even came back from being broken up.