This is a fantastic piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world.
OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI race to Anthropic.[b]
Many people here, on HN, who develop software prefer Claude, because they think it's a better product.[c]
Is your understanding of OpenAI's current competitive position similar?
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[a] You may want to provide proof online that you are who you say you are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...
[b] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-04-01/openais-sh...
[c] For example, there are 2x more stories mentioning Claude than ChatGPT on HN over the past year. Compare https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru... to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
https://xcancel.com/RonanFarrow/status/2041127882429206532#m
The overall response and particularly the body language speaks a lot.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Ronan Farrow’s journalism and willingness to speak truth to power. I think he’s pulling at exactly the right thread here, and it’s very important to counteract Altman’s reputation laundering given that we run a very real risk of him weaseling his way into the taxpayer’s wallet under the current administration.
The last person that this happened to was Sam Bankman Fried as investors and regular folk finally realized he was full of complete shit and could only talk the game for so long until the truth emerged.
The jokes write themselves
Not all billionaires are villians. But it is long-known in organizational psychology that dark triad [1] traits are very "helpful" if one wants to climb career ladders fast.
Also, there's the psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies of greedier people and the false "virtue" "greed is good" that is contrary to the values espoused by Adam Smith.
We need standard income tax brackets of 90% after $20M/y and 99% after $100M/y.