Apple’s Sherlock killed the third-party Watson search utility for the Mac. Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer into Windows steamrolled Netscape Navigator. And whatever OpenAI does next could upend today’s startup ideas just as quickly.
How startups can avoid that reality was one of the questions at the Madrona IA Summit in Seattle on Wednesday. Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, shared advice for founders trying to innovate in the shadow of a company racing toward artificial general intelligence.
The gist of Kwon’s advice: look for specialized applications, vertical domains, and product experiences where OpenAI is unlikely to go deep.
For example, he pointed to areas such as manufacturing processes — problems that are highly specific, technical, and far from OpenAI’s quest for artificial general intelligence, or AGI, the still-theoretical goal of creating AI systems with human-level abilities across different tasks.
He warned against fine-tuning models or collecting data just to patch over the shortcomings of current AI models. A smarter bet is to assume the models will get better, and build products that deliver real value in more specialized niches.
