I see OpenAI is entering the phase of building peripheral products no one asked for. Another widget here and there. In my experience, when a company stops innovating, this usually happens. Time for OpenAI to spend 30 years being a trillon dollar company and delivering 0 innovations akin to Google.
Last mile delivery of foundational models is part of innovating. Innovation didn't stop when transistors were invented - innovation was bringing this technology to the masses in the form of Facebook, Google Search, Maps and so on.
But transistor designers didn't pivot away from designing transistors. They left Facebook and all the other stuff to others and kept designing better transistors.
Googles marginal ROIC is horrific. Its average ROIC in the aggregate on the other hand looks nice, because most of its returns are from projects taken 10+ years ago.
