Cracks are appearing in OpenAI’s dominant facade

THE 21ST-CENTURY tech landscape was built with a winner-takes-all mindset. It started with Microsoft’s Windows monopoly at the end of the 1990s. Since then Alphabet-owned Google has cornered search and Amazon has become the king of e-commerce. Meta, too, has blanketed much of the world with social media—though on November 18th, a judge in Washington, DC, spared it the ignominy of being declared a monopolist.

- The Economist

No surprise then that with the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), everyone has jostled to be, if not the outright winner, then at least on the winning team. Since it launched ChatGPT in late 2022, OpenAl has been the one to beat. But its dominance is under threat. That was underscored on November 18th when Microsoft and Nvidia, two big backers of OpenAl, threw their weight behind Anthropic, a big rival to the maker of ChatGPT that has hitherto been financed by Amazon and Google. On the same day, Google threw down the gauntlet with a new model.