Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I ask whether OpenAI has quietly abandoned its AI super app as customer confusion around AI continues to grow.
Highlights
00:02 — I wonder if over at OpenAI it’s got a detective case going on here — the case of the missing AI super app. This is a concept, an idea that OpenAI floated very visibly, very demonstratively five months ago at the end of March, when the company put out a landmark blog post outlining its valuation.
00:44 — It laid out in detail its plans, its strategy, how, you know, compute is the base, then models, then that leads, you know, to other steps, all of which makes businesses and individuals more capable.
01:48 — But, in the August 24 Sarah Friar post on LinkedIn, there was zero mention of this AI super app. Now, was it just an oversight? I don’t think so. Sarah Friar’s pretty good with the details, pretty good with the strategy, and I wonder if, in hindsight, they’re saying, you know, customers are already being overwhelmed with so many new things.
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02:47 — What seemed like a great idea five months ago might not be such a great idea now. They’ve perhaps got other priorities, and I just think this notion of calling something a super app comes at a very bad time. I’ve got a detailed article later this morning on CloudWars.com where I offer a lot of context, and I compare side by side.
04:44 — I think, therefore, that it’s possible that OpenAI has rethought this and said, “We’re going to blow by this AI super app thing. It’s just too much novelty, too much of a distraction, perhaps too much confusion for customers here to deal with when they have so many other highly relevant, urgent things to grapple with now.”
