{
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  "title": "OpenAI burns the boats (to go all in on advertising?)",
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              "src": "https://ethanding.substack.com/p/openai-burns-the-boats",
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              "title": "openai burns the boats",
              "description": "the $334 machine that openai is aiming at anthropic",
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              "plaintext": "last week, openai dropped gpt-5 at $10 per million tokens"
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              "plaintext": "at almost 10x cheaper than anthropic’s flagship and on par in performance benchmark, it’s openai’s declaration of its willingness to destroy the margins in “training and delivering” inference."
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              "plaintext": "Ethan goes on to describe the “four kingdoms of profit” for tech companies with a graph showing advertising, cloud infrastructure, productivity software, and systems of record."
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          {
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            "block": {
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              "plaintext": "you pick one kingdom. you defend it with your life. you burn everything else to defend it."
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              "plaintext": "“inference was supposed to be the next AWS” - and Anthropic and Claude, especially for code, was/is outperforming OpenAI, so maybe they are pivoting?"
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              "plaintext": "A good read no matter what you think of the conclusions."
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            "block": {
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              "facets": [],
              "plaintext": "ChatGPT has become the noun and the verb for the entire industry, much like “Google” before them."
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          },
          {
            "$type": "pub.leaflet.pages.linearDocument#block",
            "block": {
              "$type": "pub.leaflet.blocks.text",
              "facets": [],
              "plaintext": "And Google very much is playing catchup, although owning both web search and the productivity suite gives them a built in distribution. "
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          {
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            "block": {
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              "plaintext": "Looking at the “four kingdoms”, the productivity space has Microsoft at $69B, Adobe (???) at $18B, and a very large “Others” at $45B."
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          },
          {
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            "block": {
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              "facets": [],
              "plaintext": "This is where Notion sits and a bunch of other software that is at least nominally designed to help you be efficient."
            }
          },
          {
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              "facets": [
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                  "features": [
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              "plaintext": "How much of this gets eaten by generalist [[malleable software]]?"
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            "block": {
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              "plaintext": "At enterprises, might malleable software grow out of the “system of record” software? They all claim to do this already (eg Salesforce apps)."
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          {
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            "block": {
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              "plaintext": "All in all this still makes me want to fight so that not everything gets sucked into the big tech clouds and/or becomes filled with advertising. "
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              "plaintext": "This productivity space is the main area to focus on if we want to provide software that people & businesses will pay for and be built in a way that supports user agency."
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  "description": "Ethan Ding describes OpenAI’s order of magnitude pricing drop as both an attack on Anthropic and a move that means they have to get into advertising",
  "publishedAt": "2025-09-02T04:25:24.544Z"
}