Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?
I'm questioning why OpenAI or Anthropic sell tokens as their primary money maker if frontier models are so good. Couldn't they make more money by starting companies themselves that leverage the models and building their own products? Is selling tokens really the best strategy?
They are doing that. That is why they have moved into the app layer. They are counting on software being replaced with agentic super apps. The only reason they aren't starting actual service companies is that those still require human boots on the ground. But they are pushing their way into consulting (they bought my friends consulting firm)
- epsteingpt
The sort of obvious answer is the same reason McKinsey hasn't taken over the Fortune 500 despite consulting and having deep knowledge of the operations of most of those companies.
AI is brains. Companies need arms and legs and relationships.
The reality is that employees are also mostly not entrepreneurs, same as consultants.
There are trillions of company ideas in those tokens, just like there are trillions of shots in the fans head watching the basketball players.
Takes years, patience, capital and the right mindset to get to the point to even take the shot.
- maxdo
The question formed wrong . They killed entire industries. I feel like they are at inflection point where they hired fde , but for now they try to solve fancy problems to do not visually scare their customers .
Yet picture is very sad , industries affected to the point that majority of the companies asking about their existence:
1) software dev tools all IDE , developer analytics tools eg jellyfish etc . Dead . On the same note : warp.dev that raised $80m a year ago as an ai terminal… can barely explain why do they exist now.
Visual workflow editors . Older ones and even n8n. There were literally 1000 companies that were doing small deployments. Why do you need it now ? A year ago half of the Internet was booming about these tools .
Any data visualization tools . Gone .
Data integration tools all kind of crm to crm to erp to something else . Solved problem
And you can go on and on . I would probably not exaggerate if I’d say that millions of businesses are heavily affected by, from tiny one to adobe .
- jonnat
They don't need to start 100 companies, they just need to start one, call it Jane Street 2.0 if you will, and all their funding troubles would be gone. But they don't, because that would be competing with actual intelligence in a very measurable way. Instead they keep acquihiring companies like Astral, known for carefully crafting software rather than vive coding, while claiming they are just about to solve all humanity's problems.
- CoolestBeans
1. They are starting to do it. Take a look at OpenAI's product portfolio, there's a galaxy of attempts at application.
2. Selling tokens via long running agents is the only thing that's provably working with respect to revenue growth.
3. They need revenue yesterday. Increases in borrowing rates means access to capital isn't what it was in the 10s. Their runway is much shorter than you would imagine.
4. Some of the decision makers at these companies believe AI will exhibit Jevons Paradox and that any decrease in price will result in induced demand.
5. The frontier models are still subject to the limitations of AI. They're not good at everything. Better to have someone else learn that on their dime rather than yours.
- vulk
They will. It is a matter of time I just think the models are not fully there yet. The most obvious outcome for those companies will be similar to what Amazon is doing with their marketplace as soon as some product is doing ok in the sales charts they just spin their own product and push it I think it was Amazon basics or something like that.
Even if they don't end up making 100 different companies they are for sure going to acquire companies, or build internally, and incorporate functionality in the main product.
For me that is the only way they can keep going to vendorize the software industry, and there are already some signs for this.
- adelekeabdulgan
"is selling tokens really the best strategy"
Yes. in a gold rush, the best strategy is to sell shovels. they sold us an idea of whats possible, while they earn NOW.
come to think of it, whether you succeed in building the "next big thing" with thier tokens or not, they get paid.
- testemailfordg2
Its like a shovel making company being asked during gold rush, if you have the shovel or even for arguments sake best and most efficient shovel..Like OpenAI or Claude here..The why are you not searching for gold yourselves...
- harrouet
Because they already employ thousands of programmers that the AI cannot replace. Don't believe the marketing hype about AGI, we are extremely far from it.
- mochidusk
Going up the value chain is much more difficult as opposed to going down. A packaging company for example will have a much harder time creating a snack company than the snack company creating a packaging company. The snack company will know exactly what it needs for its packaging and have strict requirements.
Down the chain you see what you need to do because you work directly with it everyday.
- vladimirralev
That would scare people away from sharing their knowledgebases with them and regulators to act. At this stage, as long as people are sharing more and more knowledge with the models or if there is roadmap to collect more training data somehow, the smart move is to wait.
But look at the ArtCraft project. At least one of labs has an internal benchmark to clone 20+ popular products much like ArtCraft but with much higher budget and several configurations of the workflow. ArtCraft spent $20K initially, not sure how much by now, but they are moving fast and the apps work. They day is coming when they can flip and just clone everything including the ops.