What OpenAI Really Wants

The hidden economics of LLM agglomeration and startup extinction

I. Introduction: A False Hope

There’s a lie infecting Silicon Valley: that GPT-4 is the new iPhone, and prompt engineering is the new app store. But LLMs aren’t platforms. They’re predatory runtime engines, and if you build on them, they will eat you

To understand why, we need to revisit the history of another agglomerative force: Google in the 2000s.