a16z partner David George: OpenAI's advantage lies in creating new customers and distribution

David George, a general partner at a16z, stated that OpenAI understands a rare but important thing: the purpose of a business is to create customers. He believes that OpenAI will not win solely due to model, chip, cost performance, or product leadership, but because it excels at creating new types of customers and has a more sustainable distribution strategy.

David George indicated that in the context where intelligent services are widely available, the key is whether new usage behaviors can be awakened and distribution won. He summarized the leverage for building cutting-edge large-scale AI businesses as creating new behaviors, reaching a large number of users, pricing to capture value, and increasing conversion costs, and he believes that the last two are difficult to form long-term advantages; competition ultimately depends on the first two.

The article also mentioned that OpenAI has found seemingly simple breakthroughs in areas such as chat interfaces, reasoning, tool invocation, and Computer Use multiple times, and is building long-term distribution in a platform manner. David George stated that OpenAI has a broad user base covering consumers, professional users, and enterprises, as well as the ability to deeply understand its own technology stack, thus being better positioned to discover reusable new patterns and foundational capabilities.