Altman: OpenAI had no defensibility strategy for ChatGPT in its early days
Sam Altman · Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware · Y Combinator · Jun 21, 2025 · at 16:10
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shares the history of ChatGPT's competitive moat with Y Combinator's Garry Tan at AI Startup School.
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“It took us a long time to figure out how to answer the defensibility question for ChatGPT. We had built this thing, and for a long time, the only defensibility was, like, we had the only product out in the market. And then we kind of, like, a brand that started to be well known. And now we have things like memory and connections and a whole bunch of other stuff that really is defensible, but You know, that was like a fair criticism of us for a long time. We didn't have any defensibility strategy. We just, like, had the only good thing out there, and then you have some window before which you have to build defensibility.”
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