OpenAI Understands Something Important and Rare

OpenAI understands something special and rare, hiding in plain sight. Which is, as Peter Drucker put it a half century ago, the purpose of a business is to create a customer.

OpenAI is not going to win because they have the best models, or the most advanced chips, or the best cost-performance curve, or even the best product, although we think they do have those things. We think that OpenAI will win because they are so good at creating new kinds of customers, and because they have the most durable distribution strategy.

As we write this in September 2026, the intelligence-as-a-service product rankings aren’t the most important question anymore. Intelligence is everywhere. Anyone can do nearly anything; but most people aren’t, yet. Can you awaken the new behavior, and can you win at distribution, are what matters.

The case for OpenAI comes down to the following argument. To build a durable business at AI frontier scale, there are four levers you can pull:

1. Create new kinds of behavior
2. Distribute to lots of users
3. Price your product in a way that captures value
4. Have high switching costs

4 is basically out. The AI Frontier is a Red Queen’s Race, at least at the model layer. It’s so easy to swap between models, down to task-by-task switching, and everyone’s getting better all the time.