View / OpenAI, Anthropic should focus on their own success than chase each other

Anthropic’s Super Bowl commercials panning OpenAI’s ad plans were creative, but they also revealed one of the biggest threats to both of these frontier AI startups: themselves.

Anthropic’s Claude has taken off in the enterprise while OpenAI’s ChatGPT has hit big with the masses, closing in on a billion users. The problem is that instead of focusing on their core audiences, both companies want what they can’t have. It’s a distraction.

Anthropic launched its Claude chatbot before OpenAI came out with ChatGPT, but Claude was only available to a small group of users.

Had Claude come out first, it might have taken the world by fire, as ChatGPT did, and the fortunes of the two companies may have been reversed.

Fortunately for Anthropic, it had something special. Claude was extremely good at coding, and was quickly embraced by serious developers.

Anthropic has done a brilliant job of positioning itself as the “responsible” startup, focused on AI safety and on solving the vexing problem of deciphering how these nondeterministic “black box” models work. That message plays extremely well in corporate America.

Coding assistance is likely the No. 1 enterprise use case today and the most lucrative. Anthropic could be on its way to becoming a success story of Microsoft proportions: That is, an essential tool that companies can’t live without. And yet, Anthropic is still trying to position Claude as a ChatGPT competitor for the consumer market.

OpenAI, on the other hand, is like early Facebook: a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence where a single consumer product evolves into a business empire.

But OpenAI seems intent on being an enterprise company, too, and isn’t shying away from a fight with Google and Apple.

Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg had decided in 2007 that Facebook needed to take on Microsoft and become a powerful enterprise app, instead of growth-hacking his way to taking over the internet.

If ChatGPT stays focused on what it’s good at, it’s primed to become a de facto AI operating system for consumers, giving them an easy and safe way to automate their lives. It’s a much bigger opportunity, actually, than Facebook had in its early days.

But it’s also a heavier lift. Apple wants to do the same thing, enlisting Google’s AI expertise to get the job done. It will take a massive, all-hands-on-deck effort for OpenAI to win.

Likewise, Anthropic already has a leg up in the enterprise market, which, unlike the consumer market, is not “winner takes all.” Competition is fierce: There’s Microsoft, but there’s also a growing wave of companies creating bespoke AI implementations inside companies using free, open-source models.

Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI can afford to focus on anything else right now. Their best bet is to play the hand they were dealt.