It's rare to see an AI model vendor openly admit that their product's competitive advantage is weak, but it actually makes a lot of sense.
During a fireside chat at Stripe Sessions on the 29th, Sam Altman positioned OpenAI as the AI version of Stripe, which charges based on usage, meaning the larger the network, the more the platform earns, and the happier the users are.
What he wants to do is sell "usable intelligence" so that anyone can buy it to automate their business, develop products, or directly embed it into their own services.
OpenAI has signed 20-year electricity and land contracts, demonstrating a long-term strategic approach.
The low switching cost is exactly what Sam Altman wanted.
Altman directly acknowledged that the switching cost for AI is very low. He said that users have recently flocked to Codex (currently with over 3 million weekly active users) from competing programming tools, but the smarter the AI, the easier it is to switch platforms. "You can just tell the agent and move."
Under this industrial structure, it is unrealistic to expect high profits. It is better to embrace "always low profit" and win by scale and growth rate.
Stripe co-founder Collison followed up with the question: What's your view on "AI companies swallowing up the entire value chain"?
Sam Altman said that some companies do want to do this, but OpenAI does not. He sees the data center, the model, and the harness (the middle layer for scheduling and orchestrating AI) as a whole output, which is "usable intelligence." Other companies build products on top of it, and the smarter the model, the more the customer benefits.
Under this architecture, OpenAI doesn't need a high profit margin because it's not selling products; it's selling electricity and water.
This implies that companies that expect their models to stagnate will eventually be eliminated.
Sam Altman summed up a criterion for judging future companies in one sentence: "If a company secretly hopes that the model won't improve, it means it's trying to compensate for the model's shortcomings (profits that the model can't achieve), and the next time the model provider upgrades, such companies will be eliminated sooner or later."
He also advised companies not to overestimate the impact of AI on existing business structures. While agents do need to process payments, the money ultimately has to go through some channel, and companies that make good products won't disappear because of AI. "The world has gone a bit crazy about this."
Finally, he named Shopify CEO Toby Lütke as the best AI adopter he had ever seen, including taking matters into his own hands and pushing his team to keep up, without resorting to fancy tricks like token leaderboards. He simply said, "All businesses use AI." The token leaderboard always sounds like a dig at certain large companies.
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