The more I learn about OpenAI here, the more I'm seeing the "No" side of this. To be honest, I'm a little shocked at the recurring revenue OpenAI has already achieved. My bet here was based on the idea that search is clearly a multi-billion dollar business while "LLMs" are not (yet) clearly that.

My assumption there is wrong. While I'm not convinced the chatbot is the final form factor here, it is clear that OpenAI, with revenue already in the billions and a $40 billion cash infusion, is here to stay.

@JimmyCerone another update here. The revenue of Perplexity was only $34 million in 2024 per Ad Exchanger: https://ai.omeclk.com/portal/public/ViewCommInBrowser.jsp?Sv4+eOSSucxygVSOywKv8kuz7uuzqVY0g6n/XExB4DMXpkOieaKN3f6l7ClAG9aQW2sKLOq6WqG2b/68W9+ZCg%3D%3DA.

Even worse, Perplexity is stuck sending money to AWS (Cloud Provider) and OpenAI / Anthropic to the tune of $15 million and $8 million, almost 100% of their revenue in the last year. I did not consider the fact they are stuck throwing their money at competitors to survive here.

Could anti-trust law step in here somehow? It does feel near impossible to compete if you are not one of the Big 7 or partnered with them (OpenAI). I think anti-trust action will come here, but it will be far too late for the likes of Perplexity.

@JimmyCerone another interesting piece of data here is that Perplexity is raising at $14 billion valuation, more than 10x less than OpenAI (~$300 billion) and at a multiple of over 100x revenue. OpenAI is at a multiple of between 20-50, which seems far more reasonable, even cheap. Source: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/prof-g-markets/id1744631325?i=1000706778779