Openai’s decision to buy the company Gadget de Jony IVE, IO, concerns distribution.
The generative race of AI has entered a new scene. It was a question of creating the best models of AI, but they are all Quite similar these days.
Which ultimately will depend much more on distribution and less on the quality of underlying technology.
Get chatgpt and other OPENAI models and products in users’ hands – that’s what really matters. Without this direct relationship, these products will not be used as much, or it will cost a lot to indirectly obtain offers to consumers.
I designed the ultimate distribution tool for technology, Apple iPhone. Then he left and started working on IO, a new type of device built for the AI era.
AI could trigger a wave of new gadgets
While phones are still dominating, the generative AI could change that. We could all wear smart glasses with integrated aa chatbots. Meta, Apple, Google and others work on it. We could have a small clip attached to our shirts, so that we can constantly converse with AI models and chatbots. Who knows what could work elsewhere in this new era?
Anyway, if you are Sam Altman in progress, you do not want to have Google or Meta or Apple standing between you and your users. Do you know what’s going on? You end up having to pay the distribution. Mark Zuckerberg despises being an application on the Apple mobile device platform, which takes juicy cost of 30% of many developers. Even Google pays Apple about $ 20 billion a year for its search engine to be distributed on iPhones and other Apple gadgets.
Does Altman want to pay $ 20 billion in Apple in a few years? Does he want to give Tim Cook 30% of the revenues that the OpenAi generates from applications paid by Chatgpt on Iphones? Of course not.
A solution is to hire the original iPhone designer to build OpenAi’s own gadgets. This quote marked me in the announcement of Openai on the agreement with IVE and his company IO.
“It has become clear that our ambitions to develop, engineering and manufacturing a new family of products required a whole new business,” wrote Altman and IVE.
Even if this material journey costs billions of dollars, it could be cheaper than paying other technology giants for distribution. And at least you control your own destiny and have this direct relationship with users.
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io vs io
I write this on Google IO, the annual conference of the Internet giant. Altman likes to crush this party. He did it last year and he redone it today. This is all the more perfect because the IVE devices society is called IO.
My interpretation of this party crash is that Altman could be quite worried about Google.
Despite this very expensive affair with Apple, Google is a distribution master, and he uses everything at his disposal to quickly obtain his new AI products and tools in as many hands as possible. These are the offers that compete directly with Chatgpt.
Here are some examples of Google’s distribution power, taken partly this week at Google Io and partly of all the work Google has been doing for 20 years. For a startup like Openai, it must be terrifying.
- Android, Google’s mobile operating system, supports more than 3 billion devices. The company shows its GEMINI AI chatbot service on as many Android gadgets as possible.
- There are millions of pixel and chromebooks devices. And guess what? Google weaves Gemini in many of these phones and laptops.
- Chromebooks, Android and Pixel are mainly means to directly distribute Google technology to users. Chrome is the default browser on these Googley gadgets. This week in Io, Google has shown how Gemini is now cooked in the Chrome browser. It is suddenly more than a billion users who will see Gemini every day, and they could end up using this chatbot, rather than chatgpt.
- Then there is the Big Kahuna: Google Search. The company has announced several ways that its new AI technology was being research. There is a new AI mode that was launched in the United States on Tuesday. Suddenly, around 250 million people will see – and will probably use – the mode has regularly. Because it is cooked at the top of the search page in good place. There are about 1.5 billion of Google Search daily users.
This is the type of distribution power whose startups can only dream. If Openai really wants to compete with technology giants, he really needs new gadgets from Jony IVE – and a host of other distributions.
Distribution = Data = Best IA
Why is it so important? Well, AI products only really improve when many people use them regularly. The co-founder of Google Larry Page called this the toothbrush test: if your product is not used twice a day, forget it.
If this happens, AI companies can collect data mountains on how users behave. This information informs the updates of products. But in the AI generating era, this data is also incredibly precious to develop new AI models and related products. This data can be pumped in the formation of new models, with certain user authorizations. It can also be used for fine adjustment and other AI development techniques.
The more you have, the better. Again, this data feedback loop only works if you have a distribution: massive distribution.
