OpenAI’s DevDay, held Monday at San Francisco’s historic Fort Mason, was exceptionally Apple-coded.
It seems obvious to say—after all, CEO Sam Altman has previously spoken about his admiration of Steve Jobs and iPhone designer Jony Ive is now at OpenAI, to the tune of billions. But sitting in a bright, converted firehouse, watching Altman and other OpenAI leaders (Greg Brockman, Brad Lightcap, and Nick Turley) take questions, I realized I’d never thought that corollary (or ambition) through entirely.
The day’s product announcements were odes to simplicity and ease of use. The company’s Apps SDK featured tie-ins with partners like Canva and
Zillow, while the AgentKit product was the first thing I’ve seen so far that actually makes me think I have a fighting chance of building an agent of my own. Codex, OpenAI’s coding tool, became available to all, with a Slack integration to boot.
The message, textually and subtextually, over and over was encapsulated in something Altman said to the crowd during the morning keynote: “We’re going to focus on what matters most to you all, which is making it easier to build with AI.”
With its $500 billion valuation, OpenAI has become one of the most powerful and influential privately held companies to ever come upon the tech sector. Still, there’s a lot of tension embedded in OpenAI’s story right now.
On one hand, they’re a dazzling market leader, with 800 million weekly active users, and the power to move public markets. On the other hand, there are areas in which OpenAI isn’t the obvious winner. A number I kept turning over in my head: OpenAI has four million developers on its platform, which is the same number of developers
working with startup Supabase, which I covered last week as they hit a $5 valuation. It’s a contradiction—one of the most powerful companies in the world, yet with no guarantee of permanence.
In this vein, OpenAI seems to be operating with a keen awareness of its competitive environment and is candid about what it doesn’t know. In response to a question about how advertising may affect ChatGPT, Altman told journalists: “This is exactly why we’re trying to keep an open mind right now, because it’s impossible to foresee certain interaction effects between those decisions…We’re being humble about the future for reasons you suggest, but we’re working toward it.”
The day ended with a conversation between Altman and Ive, both of whom I’d never seen in person before. Sitting side by side, they come across as a thoughtful, deeply optimistic pair. And I thought about how the goal in the end is still something that, for OpenAI, for all its dominance, is a way off—a quiet, pervasive, long-term infrastructural place in society.
“If the solution is clever, it should just work,” said Ive, echoing the famous
Apple design mantra, a paradigm that also applies to companies. “It should seem inevitable, as if there wasn’t possibly another rational solution to the problem.”
Term Sheet Podcast… On Monday, I sat down with OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap at the company’s DevDay in San Francisco to discuss where the company stands in the enterprise market, his thoughts on the “AI bubble,”
that MIT study, his startup background, and more.
Listen and watch here.See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinksEmail: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.comSubmit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter
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