OpenAI Steals The Spotlight From Google (Again)

Two very different demo styles from OpenAI and Google. Also, Squarespace went private at $7B.

Author

Adam Hardej
May 15, 2024

AI continues to develop at a rapid pace with OpenAI at the helm - at least from a popular culture perspective. Google continues to be a meme (see below), but they also printed $24B of Net Income in Q1 so maybe they’re not as worried about it as Tech Twitter thinks they should be. Squarspace also went private at $7B if anyone cares. Figured I should sprinkle in something non-AI related. Mix up the color palette a bit.

RSVP to our Raising a Successful Pre-Seed Round in 2024 event next week and check out recordings as well as founder profiles from last week’s demo day below.

OpenAI releases GPT-4o, a faster model that’s free for all ChatGPT users

“OpenAI is launching GPT-4o, an iteration of the GPT-4 model that powers its hallmark product, ChatGPT. The updated model “is much faster” and improves “capabilities across text, vision, and audio,” OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said in a livestream announcement on Monday. It’ll be free for all users, and paid users will continue to “have up to five times the capacity limits” of free users, Murati added.”

Everything Google Announced at I/O 2024

“It was AI all day at Google’s developer keynote. The company showed off new AI-powered chatbot tools, new search capabilities, and a bunch of machine intelligence upgrades for Android.”

Squarespace to go private in $7 billion private-equity deal

“Permira agreed to pay $44 per share in cash, a roughly 30% premium to Squarespace’s unaffected share price. In recent years, Squarespace struggled to capture public-market support: It opened below its $50 reference price in 2021 and never again traded above its $48 open price.”

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NEXT WEEK: Raising a Successful Pre-Seed Round in 2024

​Join us live on Thursday, May 23rd at 3 PM EST to learn more about securing pre-seed funding in 2024. Super excited to sit down with Julian and Andrew on this. They know this world better than anyone with great perspectives to offer from both the investor and founder perspective.

​​Some links so you can check out our awesome guests:

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LAST WEEK: Supernova x Sandhill Demo Day

Really enjoyed this event and thank you to everyone who showed up live! If you didn’t get a chance to see it last week, you can check out the recording on Twitter, Linkedin, or YouTube. You can also learn more about Supernova on their website here.

We were joined by 3 amazing panelists and 3 exciting founders. If you’d like to connect with any of the founders, I’d encourage you to reach out to them direction on LinkedIn (links below) or to Christopher from Supernova directly via email ([email protected]).

Our three founders:

Thank you again and see you at the next one!

PSA: AI girlfriends can hurt your feelings too

Letters From The Editor

Misc. (short for miscellaneous)

Google Doesn’t Care

The amount of money that Google prints every minute of every day is actually insane. The scale is easy to forget. They made twice as much in Q1 as OpenAI has raised to date. The biggest threat to a business like that (similar to Apple or Microsoft) isn’t OpenAI as much as it is getting called out as a monopoly. In that context, maybe OpenAI knocking at the door is actually good for them given it reduces the much more real existential risk of getting broken up. Meanwhile, Microsoft basically owns the whole thing anyways.

Lots of OpenAI headlines, but the big three contenders for ruling the post-AI universe continue to be Microsoft, Apple, and Google. I don’t really see a path where OpenAI is in that conversation on their own. Considering the Microsoft setup, I guess that was never really the plan anyways.

I’m not sure what that really says about the startup ecosystem in general. Will there be another rise to power from garage to $1T? Nvidia is the most recent story there, but they seem to have been playing in a different arena from the beginning. How does someone make it that far without being gobbled up when you’re within earshot of $20B net income per quarter? Not to mention distribution. You can definitely get rich playing this game. OpenAI and other leading AI players are well on their way, but when you zoom out they’re still pawns of the larger players in a way that doesn’t seem to line up with how the last big paradigm shift played out.

I don’t think this is necessarily bad for the consumer. Despite the memes, I do think Google and Apple will catch up eventually. They will get almost infinite chances to get it right so the probability seems high. It’s more of a commentary on the state of startups and what can be aspired to.

Talk soon,
Adam

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