O'Driscoll: Foundation LLM providers must own consumer apps to avoid API commoditization
Rory O'Driscoll · SpaceX Valued at $800BN & Harvey Raises $160M at an $8BN Price & Netflix Acquires Warner Brothers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Dec 11, 2025 · at 1:05:36
Rory O'Driscoll of Scale Venture Partners analyzes why model developers like OpenAI and Anthropic are aggressively building consumer-facing application products.
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“If at the API level, I'm a commodity, and there's me, OpenAI, and Gemini, and the swapping between us, I have got to grab the apps. And that's what you're saying. I mean, Antropic is grabbing the coding app, And obviously OpenAI is grabbing the ChatGPT consumer app, right? Because you're basically saying, I can't be sitting in the back here getting, getting swapped out by some, you know, rotational round robin on AI. I gotta own the end user here, right?”
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