[OxfordOutlander]

It makes sense for OpenAI to overpay for wrapper companies that have distribution - a good analogy is British pub (bar) companies. By mid 2000s they were struggling. Low margins, rising cost base, expensive debt.

What saved them? Heineken. They didn't care if the pubs made much of a profit - they made positive margins on having people drink their beer at market prices. They just wanted to increase volume. So they bought up several major players. In 2008 they acquired Scottish & Newcastle's operations, later thought bought Star Pubs & Bars, which had 1,049 leased and tenanted pubs, and finally half of Punch Taverns.

The same strategy can work for OpenAI - buy up the wrapper companies, and make sure YOUR models are served to the user base.

[abxyz]

An apt analogy, given...

"The company must change its mindset and become proactive in its approach to compliance. I have decided this can best be achieved by the imposition of a sanction that will serve as a deterrent to future non-compliant conduct by Star and other pub-owning businesses."

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/heineken-pub-company-fine...

[bluelightning2k]

Nice analogy. Although a simpler way to say it is simply vertical integration, a known term for the phenomenon with a whole class of benefits.

One of those benefits brings to mind another analogy: Apple. The ai model and the tooling are kind of like the hardware and software. By co-developing them you can make a better product and certainly something hard to compete with.

[somerandomness]

VS Code fork 'default model' is the new default search engine

[gabes]

This is exactly what I would do too if AGI was just around the corner.