（预览）Memory 对 ChatGPT 能做什么、OpenAI 的未来与 Google Circles 的往事，以及大学橄榄球能教给科技行业什么

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Matthew says, “Ben and Andrew loved the latest episode on Facebook’s 3 eras, and one thread jumped out to me. The way OpenAI is talking about platform ambitions publicly and in Sam’s recent interview with Ben reminds me a lot of Facebook circa 2010 to 2012. Back then, Zuckerberg talked about building an OS layer, SDKs, third-party developers, the whole thing. It felt like a big bet on becoming the platform everyone else would build on, and I’m starting to hear echoes of that same narrative in how Sam Altman frames OpenAI’s role today.

“Some of this might be structural. Venture-backed companies seem to get nudged toward platform strategies, and it’s a recurring ambition in tech, but one that often runs into the same walls. Do you see the same parallels, or does OpenAI’s positioning feel fundamentally different this time? Ben, what do you think?”

1. OpenAI Must Pick A Lane

I thought this was a really interesting email that was very thought-provoking. Sam Altman’s discussion—just for context, I’m critical of the OpenAI API broadly speaking, in that I think it’s a distraction. I think what it takes to be a good enterprise company is that you have to maintain old standards and backwards compatibility.

And, oh, by the way, OpenAI always talks about capacity constraints. Well, some of their capacity is being used by API customers, or a lot of their capacity is being used by API customers. I just think there’s a real fundamental disconnect in pursuing a consumer company and trying to be an API company. I think those are 2 very, very different jobs, and I think it’s—

Mm-hmm.

—it’s a distraction and a waste of resources for a consumer company to be trying to be an API company as well. This is where, in an ideal world, the Microsoft relationship should have worked out, where Microsoft is the API provider. That’s what they do. That’s what they’re good at. And OpenAI is pushing forward.

It goes back to the article I wrote, “The Shame of Mobile,” like a decade ago. I think I was writing it in the context of the iPad. The shame of this era is that the price to become a platform is that you have to build a great product.

But all the skills that go into building a great product make you kind of a crappy platform provider for developers, because the whole point of being a platform is that you’re letting them shine and make great products, and you’re just being stable. You’re not competing with them. You’re maximizing what you can do for developers.

The shame of it is that Microsoft is a much better platform company, but they suck at product, so they will not be a platform company in this era. Apple is a great product company, and they suck at being a platform, but we’re stuck with them.

Mm-hmm.

In an ideal world, OpenAI would have internalized this and said, “Okay, if we’re really going to lean into being the best possible product company we can be, by definition, it’s actually good that we be a bad platform company, because the skills and capabilities necessary are inversely correlated.”

Microsoft is great at being a platform company. We can let them do it—let them do all the dirty work, all the maintenance, all those sorts of things. They have the channel. We can basically monetize our technologies through them, not to the greatest extent theoretically possible because they have to take a margin too, but we can free ourselves of this burden and push forward and be the best possible consumer company we should be.

That’s my thesis.

Mm-hmm.

And I still stand behind it.

And it’s not like that thesis forsakes their upside on the consumer side.

No, it enhances it.

And that’s the point.

That’s the point.

Right.

You can do more and do better. There are just fundamental skills—

They’re still taking the moonshot. They’re just taking a smarter moonshot by offloading the really annoying, boring responsibilities—

They’re increasing the likelihood—

—to Microsoft.

—that they achieve the moonshot because they’re putting all their wood behind one arrow. And it’s not just that it’s different skills. It’s different cultures. The culture of—

Mm-hmm.

—a platform API provider is fundamentally—

Yeah.

—different from that of a groundbreaking—

Well said.

—product maker. To the extent they need to be a groundbreaking product maker is the extent to which they are diluting their effectiveness and their long-term capability by trying to be a platform. So that’s my overarching critique.

Okay. But I sense a “however” coming here in response to Matthew’s email. Am I right?

2. The AI Companion Opportunity

What I thought was compelling about what Sam said to me in that interview was this concept that there are a lot of product needs where they can’t fulfill all of them. This memory bit speaks to it: Could I take my memory? Could I take my AI persona and bring that into other apps where you sign in? Signing in with ChatGPT doesn’t just mean it’s an identity login. It means you’re bringing your AI, your circle—

Mm-hmm.

—into other experiences.

Take this recipe example. At the end of the day, again, I think the chatbot interface is underrated. I think text is the natural interface. I wrote “Messaging Is Mobile’s Killer App” in 2012 or 2013, literally the day before Facebook acquired WhatsApp—one of my luckiest timings of all time—where I basically laid out the rationale for this acquisition before it came out.

But at the end of the day, it’s not the best interface for a recipe app. I want a recipe app that I can see on my phone very quickly in the kitchen, or on a screen, or whatever it might be, so I can interact with it. So wouldn’t it be better for Matthew if he could sign in to Paprika, a great recipe app, and it’s just there and manifested in a way that’s appropriate to the use case at hand?

I think that’s a compelling vision. I will just note that I don’t think Sam actually answered my concerns about the platform. That’s a different platform business from random companies using our API. Now, maybe—

Yeah.

—the argument is that by using our API, we can layer in the login on top and it all sort of ties together. It’s like a—

So they’re maintaining their muscles in order to take the next step once the—

No, I think what it is is backwards justification for the fact that they started out as an API business, and it’s very difficult to kill. That’s the whole problem with API businesses. Once they’re out there, they’re out there.

Unfortunately, I think the relationship with Microsoft has probably diminished to the point where they can’t just seamlessly hand it off, or whatever it might be. But that vision of carrying your companion with you is really compelling. It actually fits with what I’m talking about.

Part of the idea of the AI being with you is that limiting it to 1 user interface, which is whatever OpenAI provides, is a constraint on that vision, because my circles do not all live within one app. It would be nice—

Mm-hmm.

—to be able to bring that with me.

This also speaks to the Apple and Google opportunity, which is that the easiest way to have an AI with you is to control the underlying platform where you interact with all these devices. Google and Apple can see everything on screen. They have access to memory on your device. They can insert themselves into any and all conversations in a way that ChatGPT needs to get all these partnerships and sign people up to be able to bring it in, which is much more challenging.

No, I think that part of the vision is compelling. That is an update on my critique. I still stand by my critique, but I do think that idea of carrying your AI with you to different experiences is a good one. And they’re the only ones that can do this. They’re the only ones that are large enough—

Yeah.

—to have enough users where they could go to everyone and say, “You should add a Sign in with ChatGPT button.”

And it’s all potentially a lot more valuable and compelling than being able to take your Facebook profile with you anywhere you go on the internet. In that respect, OpenAI’s positioning may actually be—

Right.

—a little bit different this time.

That goes back to our initial critique, which is: Why do I want my friends and family with me in this app, right?

I don’t want to sign in—

That’s right.

—with my Facebook account back in 2010, when it was full of drunk photos from my college years.

But good email, Matthew. And with that, we have 1 other question on ChatGPT. John says, “Regarding Ben’s take on ChatGPT memory, didn’t Google try to do this with Google Circles? The colored ovals that comprise the different facets of Ben—that was what Google Circles was trying to do as a social network. You could present different aspects of yourself to different circles.”

I thought it was a cool idea, but it didn't seem to catch on. Was it because the tech just wasn't ready yet, or because we weren't yet so ubiquitously online that we all had to adopt different personas for different forums? Today, for instance, one person's posts to Facebook are different than their posts to LinkedIn and different than posts to a group chat with a bunch of college fraternity brothers.

Ben, do you have thoughts for John? A little Google Circles history here.

3. Google Circles Needed A Network

Yeah, no, this came up at the time I wrote this article. A lot of people responded to this. Because, yes, that is the idea of Google Circles, and it was a great idea.

Mm-hmm.

The problem is that success is about more than ideas. I did a follow-up daily update to Social Networking 2.0, which I just clicked through here, and my section on this is called “Circles and Timing.” Timing matters. At that moment in time, number 1, there wasn't the cognizance of this, which John sort of admitted.

There's also the fact that Google Circles had no social network. You needed that; that was the prerequisite. Ideally, I could sort everyone in my life into these circles, and Google+ would handle that. But none of the people in my life are on Google Circles. That's a real obstacle to this.

Yes, there are a lot of examples of tech history like this, and tech is not enough, and Google’s not a social networking company. They don’t have the right culture. There are so many pieces that go into this being the case. There’s a broader point about complex systems versus designed systems.

We talked about this in the context of manufacturing and tariffs and all these sorts of bits and pieces. I’m very skeptical of attempts to design perfect systems from the top down.

Mm-hmm.

Complex systems are emergent because there are so many things that go into them and make them work that matter. In this case, it makes sense. If Google Circles came along today, a lot of people have manufactured this using group chats, using different social networks, or, in my case, even using different personas.

Something like that would make more sense today, but then you still have things like, well, no one's actually on Google Circles, right? And this is where the—

Right.

—the question of the opportunity comes in, and everyone goes back to why everyone wants to be a platform. The lower down in the stack you are, the more you could theoretically manifest and show these sorts of things.

4. America Missed The Super App

But it's kind of like the old debate: Why aren't there super apps in America when they're in China and WeChat is the app for everything or whatever? It's like, no, that's never going to happen because of the nature of how this stuff came to market in the US.

You started out; most people had PCs. They went from PCs to smartphones, and there was already this real bifurcation of different communications channels and stuff. Whereas in China, most people's first computer was their smartphone, and it was much more viable to create the everything app because it was the first thing people got, and that was a natural place to build it out.

You didn't have that path dependency—the path dependency really matters. That path was closed to the US. That's why we ended up—

Mm-hmm.

—with a screen full of apps. Again, I think this is another area where Mark Zuckerberg really got this wrong, going on and on: “No one wants a bunch of apps. They want to be centered around the people.” No, actually, that’s wrong. They do want a bunch of apps because that’s where we were at.

Go back to the Facebook phone in 2012 or 2013 or whatever it was. It's like, no, it's too late. If the Facebook phone existed a decade ago, maybe, but it didn't. Whereas in China—

Yeah.

—that was how it emerged because people were getting their first smartphones in 2011, 2012, 2013, whenever, and WeChat was there, and that was the killer app right away. There, it was the opposite. It was easier to launch something in WeChat, which everyone had, instead of expecting people to go get apps.

Mm-hmm.

5. ChatGPT Has The Consumer Lead

Path dependency matters hugely, and it matters to this discussion and this point John is raising. Google Circles was a great idea. Great ideas are one piece of many. And it also—

Right.

—just to circle this back to ChatGPT, being where they are, when they were, and getting all that consumer mindshare opens up all these possibilities to them that are not open to anyone else.

Mm-hmm.

If ChatGPT does not become this companion with you that goes everywhere and is tied into all these apps, it's not going to be any other foundation model company. It's not going to be Anthropic. It's not going to be Grok. The only other possibility is that it's one of the phone companies: Apple or Google. But even there, they're constrained to an extent by virtue of just being Android or just an iPhone.

Yeah.

That's why I'm so strident about OpenAI going for this and why I say this has the potential to be the biggest company since Facebook, because they're in the right place at the right time, and those are actually the rarest possible qualities.

6. Scale Is The Real Moat

And when you say it's just not possible for a company like Anthropic, just to tease that out, it's because they lack the scale of users to make it a meaningful—

Right. There’s nothing—

—selling point.

—technologically preventing it from being Anthropic.

Right.

The problem is they have—

Yeah.

—30 million users, and ChatGPT has 800 million users. Just because ChatGPT was first—

Yeah.

—and they captured that.

The hard part is getting to 1 billion users. And Google Circles—maybe Google Circles could have succeeded if they had gone back to 2003 and launched a social network that took the entire world by storm, but—

If they owned your identity, like I'm talking about, and then could help you parcel out your identity, yes, that would be compelling. They didn't own identity. Facebook did. It was already too late.