And Alphabet already has an established customer base / product infrastructure to roll out it's AI products, and is highly profitable. This makes it a far less risky investment than a loss-making start up. Berkshire seems to agree. It's a great power play that can only hinder competitor IPOs.
This reminds me of the Kim Dotcom saga where US attorneys accused Mega of copyright infringement when he was living in New Zealand and his company, Mega, was based in Hong Kong. Dotcom had never stepped foot in the US but somehow that was enough grounds to extradite him and force him to comply with local laws. There are plenty of examples of judicial overreach in all parts of the world. The US is no exception.
Good question. Salesforce does well because they provide the application layer to the data.
The WWW in the 1990s was an explosion of data. To the casual observer, the web-browser appeared to be the internet. But it wasn't and in itself could never make money (See Netscape). The internet was the data.
The people who build the infrastructure for the WWW (Worldcom, Nortel, Cisco, etc.) found the whole enterprise to be an extremely loss-making activity. Many of them failed.
Google succeeded because it provided an application layer of search that helped people to navigate the WWW and ultimately helped people make sense of it. It helped people to connect with businesses. Selling subtle advertising along the way is what made them successful.
Facebook did the same with social media. It allowed people to connect with other people and monetized that.
Over time, as they became more dominant, the advertising got less subtle and then the income really started to flow.
Salesforce is similar in that it helps businesses connect with and do business with each other. They just use a subscription model, rather than advertising. This works because the businesses that use it can see a direct link to it and their profitability.
And Facebook only makes money because it is essentially just an advertising platform. Same with Google. It's fundametally just ads.
The only way OpenAI can survive is to replicate this model. But it probably doesn't have the traffic to pull it off unless it can differentiate itself from the already crowded competition.
This is pretty much all that OpenAI is at the moment.
Mozilla is a non-profit that is only sustained by the generous wealthy benefactor (Google) to give the illusion that there is competition in the browser market.
OpenAI is a non-profit funded by a generous wealthy benefactor (Microsoft).
Ideas of IPO and profitability are all just pipe dreams in Altmans imagination.
OpenAI is basically just Netscape at this point. An innovative product with no means of significant revenue generation.
One one side it's up against large competitors with an already established user base and product line that can simply bundle their AI offerings into those products. Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams.
At the same time, Deepseek/Qwen, etc. are open sourcing stuff to undercut them on the other side. It's a classic squeeze on their already fairly dubious business model.
I always assume that people are lazy and try and click the least amount of squares as possible to get broadly the correct answer. Therefore, if it says motorbikes just click on the body of the bike and leave out rider and tiles with hardly any bike in them.
If it says traffic lights just click on the ones you can see lit and not the posts and ignore them if they are too far in the distance. Seems to work for me.
Market share is currently Google (91%), Bing (4%), Yandex (<2%), Baidu (<1%), Brave (<1%)
Google can and do already monetize automated search from AI models.
Heck, if they wanted to, Google could turn off search and make you go through their AI model to get information.
Imagine that. That's how powerful they are.