Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?

The sort of obvious answer is the same reason McKinsey hasn't taken over the Fortune 500 despite consulting and having deep knowledge of the operations of most of those companies. AI is brains. Companies need arms and legs and relationships. The reality is that employees are also mostly not entrepreneurs, same as consultants. There are trillions of company ideas in those tokens, just like there are trillions of shots in the fans head watching the basketball players. Takes years, patience, capital and the right mindset to get to the point to even take the shot.

1. They are starting to do it. Take a look at OpenAI's product portfolio, there's a galaxy of attempts at application. 2. Selling tokens via long running agents is the only thing that's provably working with respect to revenue growth. 3. They need revenue yesterday. Increases in borrowing rates means access to capital isn't what it was in the 10s. Their runway is much shorter than you would imagine. 4. Some of the decision makers at these companies believe AI will exhibit Jevons Paradox and that any decrease in price will result in induced demand. 5. The frontier models are still subject to the limitations of AI. They're not good at everything. Better to have someone else learn that on their dime rather than yours.

The question formed wrong . They killed entire industries. I feel like they are at inflection point where they hired fde , but for now they try to solve fancy problems to do not visually scare their customers . Yet picture is very sad , industries affected to the point that majority of the companies asking about their existence: 1) software dev tools all IDE , developer analytics tools eg jellyfish etc . Dead . On the same note : warp.dev that raised $80m a year ago as an ai terminal… can barely explain why do they exist now. Visual workflow editors . Older ones and even n8n. There were literally 1000 companies that were doing small deployments. Why do you need it now ? A year ago half of the Internet was booming about these tools . Any data visualization tools . Gone . Data integration tools all kind of crm to crm to erp to something else . Solved problem And you can go on and on . I would probably not exaggerate if I’d say that millions of businesses are heavily affected by, from tiny one to adobe .

I work in design services, basically build products for other people. I've worked with dozens of companies on dozens of products. Why don't we just create our own products? We certainly have the ability to make products. Because building the product is the easy part. Most products and businesses fail because they build the wrong thing, have the wrong requirements, have poor market fit, etc. LLMs can write code all day, they don't have the agency to know what to build.

Because the profits from any company which _could_ trivially be redone by an OpenAI agent will crash to nothing, because it could trivially be done by someone else's agent too. It's what ultimately makes the economics of OpenAI, Anthropic et al so crazy: they need to capture trillions of dollars in value, but those trillions of dollars won't exist any more. What's the value of writing a piece of marketing copy now, the same as it was last year? That, across the whole economy.