What OpenAI's RecentAcquisitions Tell Us About Their Strategy

0:00Today, we are looking at what OpenAI's recent acquisitions tell us about their strategy moving forward. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes.

0:23Hello, friends. Quick note today before we dive in. I'm actually recording this a day early because I am traveling. I'm headed to the AI Engineer World Fair in San Francisco. Because of that, this is one of those no-headlines, main-episode-only shows, but it's one that I think is pretty interesting. Over the last week or so, OpenAI has announced not one but two acquisitions. And as Bloomberg reporter Sharon Gaffery pointed out when she broke the story of the first last week, this is the first acquisition that wasn't just an acqui-hire. So what's the deal? On Friday, June 21st, OpenAI posted that they had acquired Rockset.

0:56The blog post reads, Enhancing our retrieval infrastructure to make AI more helpful. AI, they write, has the opportunity to transform how people and organizations leverage their own data. That's why we've acquired Rockset, a leading real-time analytics database that provides world-class data indexing and querying capabilities. Rockset enables users, developers, and enterprises to better leverage their own data and access real-time information as they use AI products and build more intelligent applications. We will integrate Rockset's technology to power our retrieval infrastructure across products, and members of Rockset's world-class team will join OpenAI.

1:28Said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI COO, Rockset's infrastructure empowers companies to transform their data into actionable intelligence. We're excited to bring these benefits to our customers by integrating Rockset's foundation into OpenAI products. So what is this deal about? Well, it's clearly about data and the ability for companies that are working with OpenAI to leverage their data for more advanced AI applications. J. Deep writes, OpenAI acquired Rockset, but what makes it so special? And shared a graphic which lots of people were sharing as well. The graphic is labeled World's Fastest Search and Analytics Database, and basically shows the idea of Rockset sitting between all sorts of company data sources and being able to give a variety of user-facing use cases, ranging from analytics to recommendations to geospatial search and more, access to that data with very, very low latency.

2:14Something that I've described before is the fact that enterprise teams right now are thinking about AI in two ways. Roughly put, there is horizontal AI and vertical AI. Horizontal AI refers to individual employees figuring out workflows that save them time or allow them to do new things in a more efficient way. Basically, individuals experimenting with tools to capture a half an hour here or an hour there. When you aggregate all of that across a big organization, it can add up to significant time savings, huge productivity gains in a very distributed bottoms up kind of way. However, the other side of AI, vertical AI, for lack of a better term, refers to these solutions which take advantage of all of a company's data and are available to use that data to power dedicated applications that are available to the entire team.

2:56In many ways, the big enterprise fight, at least between the Frontier Labs, is all about that vertical business, and the acquisition of Rockset is clearly meant to give OpenAI a leg up in that particular fight. Some also added this as evidence in the column that OpenAI is pushing towards building a search engine. Dwayne Forrester said, tell me you're building a search engine without telling me you're building a search engine. My position continues to be that OpenAI is not so much building a separate product as a search engine, but is slowly trying to morph ChatGPT into the role that the search engine plays now.

3:26In other words, your gateway to the rest of the internet. However, to the extent that that is just a different version of a search engine, I think this is dead on. When someone asked investor Didi Das about how this acquisition plays into OpenAI's larger strategy, he said, this is speculation, but I imagine Roxette will power all their enterprise search offerings to compete with Glean and or a consumer search offering to compete with perplexity in Google. Today's episode is, of course, brought to you by Superintelligent. And today I want to tell you about Superintelligent's Summer Challenge. We have a couple of low-key months, low-key at least in the professional sense, and that makes them a perfect time to build some new skill.

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4:35Use code SUMMERFUN to join the Summer Challenge and get 50 % off your first couple of months. You can get all the information you need at bsuper.ai. That's bsuper.ai. See you there. So that was acquisition one, but it wasn't the only one. Next up, on Monday of this week, we found out that Multi was joining OpenAI. The Multi announcement reads, what if desktop computers were inherently multiplayer? What if the operating system placed people on equal footing to apps? Those were the questions we explored in building Multi and before that, ReMotion. Recently, we've been asking ourselves how we should work with computers, Not on or using computers, but truly with computers.

5:11With AI. We believe it's one of the most important product questions of our time. And so we're beyond excited to share that Multi is joining OpenAI. TechCrunch characterized the announcement as OpenAI buying a remote collaboration platform. They write, Multi set out to build a Zoom-based platform designed for remote teams to work together through video chats. Multi offered features like the ability to collaborate across screen shares from up to 10 people at the same time, customizable shortcuts, and automatic deep links for code design and documents. So what's interesting here is how a product that was originally designed to be collaboration between different people in different places might turn into a product that's about a collaboration between a person and their computer in a slightly different way.

5:49Many pointed out that this seemed like another step in ChatGPT's move into desktop software. Investor Sarah Guo writes, Great things ahead as AI moves out of the chat box and into the desktop. Nick Kramer writes, Envision a world where ChatGPT controls your computer. This isn't science fiction. OpenAI has just acquired Multi, a collaboration tool for macOS. Nick sees some of the implications as ChatGPT handling your emails, scheduling meetings, code, analyzing data, all directed with your voice and through various apps. Nick continues, Imagine starting your day with ChatGPT summarizing overnight emails, drafting responses, and setting your schedule, your morning routine streamlined and stress-free, all while you grab a cup of coffee.

6:25Dijon writes, OpenAI just bought and shut down Multi.app, and this likely means you'll soon be able to screen share with GPT and show it things on your screen and vice versa, leading to a more integrated human AI UX. Some, like Liran Zhang, think that the acquisition might be about a specific use case of ChatGPT being a better coding agent. When Chubby on Twitter retweeted the acquisition announcement and wrote, The rumor seems to confirm that Sam Altman and OpenAI are building their own operating system and communication tool. The evidence is mounting. OpenAI leaker Jimmy Apples wrote, I'm really bored, so in case you missed it, a month or so they were hiring for this role.

6:56He pointed to a LinkedIn post looking for a software engineer who will build a quote zero-to-one product that brings ChatGPT to where our users are already doing their work, the desktop. So ultimately, what we learned from these deals is that, one, OpenAI absolutely continues to be focused on winning the enterprise battle. The company is now up to about a$3.5 billion annualized run rate, and they're clearly trying to cement their position as the leader in enterprise AI. At the same time, the Rockstat acquisition could not only help them with that, but also help push them in the direction of a different type of consumer search experience, which, if the multi-acquisition suggests anything, might be deeply integrated into ultimately what is a new way of interfacing with computers overall.

7:34I don't think OpenAI or Sam Altman have been particularly coy about the fact that they think that fundamental changes are coming to how people interact with computers. These acquisitions are breadcrumbs that are all part of that story coming to fruition. However, for some, they don't care about any of this news, and they just want features that they feel like they were already promised. Surfer808 on Reddit the other day writes, I'm sick of waiting for chat GPT 4.0 voice, and I lost a lot of respect for OpenAI. They write, I've been religiously checking for the voice update multiple times a day, considering they said it would be out in a quote, few weeks.

8:04I realize OpenAI just put that demo out there to stick it to Google's AI demo, which was scheduled for the next day. What a horrible thing to do to people. I'm sure so many people signed up hoping they would get this feature, and it's nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is doing a great job, and I'm happy with it. So as always, lots of interesting things going on in the world of OpenAI. I'm sure it won't be long before we get another announcement. Whether that announcement will be about something we can actually get our hands on? Well, that is the question. For now, though, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief.

8:31Until next time, peace.