OpenAI's new product could undercut its own investors
In between raising $6.6 billion from investors and shedding senior executives as it attepts to morph into a for-profit company, this week OpenAI announced a new editor that could hurt some companies’ similar products.
Canvas is a simple text editor that integrates ChatGPT in a side panel to help you write words and code, eliminating the need for users to jump between windows to get their work done while using ChatGPT.
While a simple text editor may not seem to be that big of a deal, it does hint at OpenAI’s product plans starting to “Sherlock” some of its competitors — and its investors.
The term refers to Apple’s pattern of occasionally launching a built-in feature or product that effectively kills an existing product in the marketplace, like it did when it announced its “Sherlock” search feature in 2002, dooming the third-party “Watson” MacOS app to irrelevancy.
Awkwardly, the release of Canvas could mean trouble for its partner Microsoft’s GitHub Co-Pilot (not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot), which also integrates generative AI into coding tools.
While a simple text editor may not seem to be that big of a deal, it does hint at OpenAI’s product plans starting to “Sherlock” some of its competitors — and its investors.
The term refers to Apple’s pattern of occasionally launching a built-in feature or product that effectively kills an existing product in the marketplace, like it did when it announced its “Sherlock” search feature in 2002, dooming the third-party “Watson” MacOS app to irrelevancy.
Awkwardly, the release of Canvas could mean trouble for its partner Microsoft’s GitHub Co-Pilot (not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot), which also integrates generative AI into coding tools.
