Venture mindset

Less than a year after introducing its agentic browser ChatGPT Atlas to the world, OpenAI recently shut it down. My guess is the team decided to make a bet on building an AI browser, but the product wasn’t really working, and Google Chrome proved to be a strong incumbent. That resulted in a decision to shut ChatGPT Atlas down as a separate product, bundle it into ChatGPT, and focus on bets with more momentum. For different reasons, OpenAI also shut down its video model Sora, even after its viral campaign mimicking Studio Ghibli’s signature images and signing a billion-dollar deal with Disney, because it wasn’t financially viable. These are just a couple of bets that OpenAI have folded on. It has many other irons in the fire. There’s ChatGPT and Codex. There’s also the multi-billion dollar acquisition of Jony Ive’s io, to make a hardware product. There’s the multi-hundred-billion dollar bet on Stargate, which it partnered with a bunch of other tech companies on. Both of them are…