OpenAI is Winning

OpenAI is clearly playing the game well: they are the dominant scaled AI product company, leading both in consumer AI products and as a major contender for enterprise solutions via API. Their aggressive market share acquisition comes with the highest cost structure, yet they consistently match or exceed breakthrough feature releases from non scaled competitors like DeepSeek (chain of thought) or Manus (multimodal agents) forces a response.

In those cases, OpenAI moves fast, deploying features that reinforce their technical edge and do so at scale to 100's of millions of useers. Their execution and release management are next-level and indicate how much capital/compute they have access to as they grow. Speculation is that they have additional products ready to ship that are entirely dependent on compute availabilty.

OpenAI’s ability to match and often outmaneuver smaller competitors while operating at a massive scale is what makes their execution next level and seems to be discounted by industry analysts. They have proven they can scale compute, accrue capital, drive cost down rapidly and lead technically several times over since launching ChatGPT.

For scale: OpenAI's ChatGPT has over 400 million weekly active users, and Microsoft’s integrations put OpenAI models in front of hundreds of millions. Enterprise adoption is accelerating, with 92% of Fortune 500 companies using OpenAI products. There is no lack of compeition but they clearly still out front.

Disclosure on bias i invested in one of their early secondaries.