> OpenAI wants to be more of a Google. It’s increasingly seeming like consumer may not be as good of a play here

OpenAI has openings right now for "AI Deployment Engineer"-style positions, which is a role where they embed that employee in one or more customer's businesses. E.g.:

https://openai.com/careers/ai-deployment-engineer-startups-s...

I think this is the right way to go about it. Getting AI integrated well is more of a consulting package than it is a technology/code thing. Just handing a business a model+API will not result in high-quality or long-term relationships. This AI transformation is the most invasive possible thing I can imagine for a business. You really need a human on site to help the other humans across the treacherous organizational and psychological bridges.

Allegedly OpenAI's contracting model is much more vicious than Anthropic's; at work (admittedly a little IP-protective) we have unlimited Claude, but no Codex subscription because OpenAI won't give us sufficient guarantees around data retention.

We are also concerned that it may not be possible to bind OpenAI using contract terms and/or the US legal system.

Even in the consumer space the cool kids stopped using ChatGPT this year. The swing in reputation and momentum these last few months has been nothing short of extraordinary. Like a political race, once a leader loses “the big mo” it’s incredibly hard to win it back. That’s the situation OpenAI faces now.