Ed Elson

We're speaking with Alex Heath, author of the Sources newsletter and co-host of the Access podcast.

So Alex, this new news from OpenAI, they are trying to ditch the side quest.

This is sort of the initiative that's being spearheaded by Fiji Simo, who I know you have interviewed and who you've been talking with.

Tell us a little bit about what you know about what they're trying to do at this point.

How has the OpenAI business strategy actually changed here?

Do you think that they see their push for consumer versus enterprise as a mistake at this point?

I mean, that's really how it seems on my end.

I look at how anthropic, how Claude is taking over the enterprise market.

But I always thought that this would happen.

And one of the predictions that I made previously

a while ago, about two years ago, I thought that ChatGPT as a consumer product was going to kind of fall by the wayside.

And my prediction was OpenAI was going to sort of shift their focus.

They had this awesome hit product, but they're going to go after the real big fish that everyone wants, which is enterprise customers.

So ChatGPT will kind of fade out of view and we'll see more emphasis on enterprise.

That's not what happened at all.

But if they had gone with what I thought they were going to do, then maybe things would look better for them.

But do you think that they view that as a mistake, that they went after the consumer and they realized this actually isn't that great of a business compared to enterprise and now they're switching over?

It does seem like focus would also just mean building out this ad business.

If they want to win in the consumer world, which they have done, and they want to figure out how to monetize it, now it's time to get into ads.

And as you just said, they just hired one of the top advertising executives from Meta, who's now going to lead their ad sales.