For tech start-ups, relentless focus can be critical. Google’s famous mission statement, to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, shaped its early priorities. A spate of upgrades to the search engine in its early years, from image search and maps to shopping and news, left it unrecognisable from where it started. By the time Microsoft launched a head-on challenge with Bing nine years later, it was already pretty much game over.
OpenAI, by contrast, has sought to make a virtue of its lack of focus. ChatGPT may have seized the public imagination, but the company has been busy trying to spin up a range of new product ideas, from a social network based on video generation to a shopping agent, while also diving into the business market.