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ChatGPT was the Google text box
Worry inside OpenAI
People inside OpenAI were worried. Growth was fast, but it felt like low-value growth, driven by people curious to talk to it, and nobody was sure what they would use it for. The company had a list of five or six other things it could focus on instead.
Thiel's answer
Thiel's answer was that doing anything but this was an obvious mistake. The power was the same as the Google text box: a box you can type anything into, and it does the right thing. ChatGPT had none of what Silicon Valley wisdom demanded, no feeds, no network effect, and no way for people to build up context and get locked in.
Doubling down
People had been chasing the Google business model for twenty years, and this was the first thing to come along that worked like it. The empty text box had worked for Google, so he told them to double down. It was growing and flexible, and it showed every sign of success except fitting the current wisdom. OpenAI went all in on ChatGPT.
Why did Google's blank search box win?
When Google launched in 1998, rival portals such as Yahoo packed their home pages with news, links, and ads to keep visitors on the site. Google's page held a logo and a single box, and its aim was to send people to their answer quickly. The sparse page also loaded fast on the slow connections of the time. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had started the company that same year while at Stanford.
How did ChatGPT's growth compare with other apps?
ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022. OpenAI's Sam Altman said it passed one million users within five days. A UBS analysis reported by Reuters estimated about 100 million monthly active users by January 2023, the fastest growth of any consumer application it had tracked. In the same analysis, TikTok took about nine months to reach 100 million users.
Why do feeds and lock-in matter to products?
A feed gives people a reason to come back, because fresh content is waiting each time they open the product. A network effect means a product grows more useful as more people join, which is why a social network is hard to leave once friends are on it. Lock-in comes from stored context, such as years of messages or files, that makes switching costly. Facebook's value to a new member, for example, depended largely on how many friends already used it.
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