Every time OpenAI comes up with a new product, and a new interaction mechanism / UX and low and behold, others copy the same, sometimes leveraging the same name as well.
Happened with ChatGPT - a chat oriented way to use Gen AI models (phenomenal success and a right level of abstraction), then code interpreter, the talking thing (that hasnt scaled somehow), the reasoning models in chat (which i feel is a confusing UX when you have report generators, and a better ux would be just keep editing source prompt), and now deep research. [1] Yes, google did it first, and now Open AI followed, but what about so many startups who were working on similar problems in these verticals?
I love how openai is introducing new UX paradigms, but somehow all the rest have one idea which is to follow what they are doing? Only thing outside this I see is cursor, which i think is confusing UX too, but that's a discussion for another day.
[1]: I am keeping Operator/MCP/browser use out of this because 1/ it requires finetuning on a base model for more accurate results 2/ Admittedly all labs are working on it separately so you were bound to see the similar ideas.
Yes,see sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064111 . I think you will find a predecessor to most of OpenAIs interaction concepts. Also canvas was I guess inspired by other code copilots. I think their competence is rather being able to put tons of resources into it pushing it into the market in a usable way (while sometimes breaking things). Once OpenAI had it the rest feels like they now also have to move. They are simply have become defacto reference.
Yes, OpenAI is the leader in the field in a literal sense: once they do something, everyone else quickly follows.
They also seem to ignore usurpers, like Anthroipic with their MCP. Anthropic succeeded in setting a direction there, which OpenAI did not follow, as I imagine following it would be a tacit admission of Anthropic's role as co-leader. That's in contrast to whatever e.g. Google is doing, because Google is not expressing right leadership traits, so they're not a reputational threat to OpenAI.
I feel that one of the biggest screwups by Google was to keep Gemini unavailable for EU until recently - there's a whole big population (and market) of people interested in using GenAI, arguably larger than the US, and the region-ban means we basically stopped caring about what Google is doing over a year ago already.
See also: Sora. After initial release, all interest seems to have quickly died down, and I wonder if this again isn't just because OpenAI keeps it unavailable for the EU.
Happened with ChatGPT - a chat oriented way to use Gen AI models (phenomenal success and a right level of abstraction), then code interpreter, the talking thing (that hasnt scaled somehow), the reasoning models in chat (which i feel is a confusing UX when you have report generators, and a better ux would be just keep editing source prompt), and now deep research. [1] Yes, google did it first, and now Open AI followed, but what about so many startups who were working on similar problems in these verticals?
I love how openai is introducing new UX paradigms, but somehow all the rest have one idea which is to follow what they are doing? Only thing outside this I see is cursor, which i think is confusing UX too, but that's a discussion for another day.
[1]: I am keeping Operator/MCP/browser use out of this because 1/ it requires finetuning on a base model for more accurate results 2/ Admittedly all labs are working on it separately so you were bound to see the similar ideas.